Nampa Police | A million-dollar video analytics system for the police department

The cameras came before the room. Nampa’s real time crime center was authorized for construction in February 2023. The software and the cameras that feed it were bought ten months earlier, for a million dollars, at a meeting where the item was called an Intelligent Video Analytics System.

What the council voted on

On 4 April 2022 the council authorized the mayor and the police chief to sign a contract with Motorola for $1,058,000. It was item 5-8, new business rather than consent. A police captain presented it with a handout, a finance officer answered questions, and the roll call was every councilmember present voting yes.^[1]

The staff report lists what the money buys: Motorola CommandCentral Aware software and hardware, 60 Avigilon cameras with analytics over 30 intersections, BriefCam video analytics software, an MCC7500e radio console, integration with what the department already runs, and a five-year support period.^[2] Avigilon is a Motorola company. The system, the report says, “would reside on a central server housed in a secure location at the Nampa Public Safety Building”.^[2]

It was a sole source purchase. The council had authorized Public Works and the police department to go sole source to Motorola in June 2021, on an estimate of $900,000 to $1,050,000, and the reason the report gives is compatibility: the department already runs Motorola radio and dispatch, and those are compatible with CommandCentral Aware, with Avigilon’s video management system and with BriefCam.^[2]

Who paid for it

The report’s funding lines are two: “$1 million ARPA dollars committed to emergency response and public safety” and “$58,000 in 911 fees”.^[2]

ARPA is the American Rescue Plan Act, the federal pandemic recovery program. Nearly the whole cost of a police video analytics platform came from it.

What the report says it is for

The staff report is direct about the two departments sharing it. The system “will allow the Nampa Police Department (NPD) and Public Works Department (PWD) - Street Division to remotely monitor public right-of-way using CCTV cameras, centralized network video, and cloud-based video management software”.^[2]

On the analytics, it says the system “will include advanced logic and analytics capabilities such as machine learning to recognize and identify vehicles of interest” and “can simplify criminal investigations by quickly searching recorded video and pinpointing key times for officer observation”.^[2]

The same packet contains a briefing on what the city calls its Integrated Command Center, a joint effort of Public Works and the police department with four named components: the Intelligent Transportation System, Traffic and Crime Analytics, an Emergency Operations Center, and a Real-time Crime Center whose operators “leverage real-time and historical data to proactively respond to public safety incidents”.^[5] That is the plan the February 2023 construction item would later build the room for.

Facial recognition, in the city’s own words

The clearest description of what this system was meant to do is not the 2022 staff report. It is the sole source justification the city wrote in June 2021, the document that argued only one vendor could supply it.

That document describes three layers. The CommandCentral Aware platform gives “a consolidated, map-based common operating picture”, integrating live camera viewing, recorded video from the video management system, real-time alerts, advanced data analytics, resource tracking, social media analytics, voice and dispatch integration.^[4] The video management system itself provides “intelligent video analytics such as license plate recognition (LPR), object classification/tracking/counting, unusual activity detection and unusual motion detection”.^[4]

Then the third layer. “In addition to the analytics provided by the VMS, a video analytics workstation is proposed to provide a separate offline investigation tool for the Nampa PD. This system would provide additional powerful tools for the analysis of recorded video clips such as facial recognition, object proximity/direction/path/size and line crossing.”^[4]

That is the city describing facial recognition for its police department, in a document it wrote to justify buying from one vendor without competition. It is not a vendor brochure and it is not a speculation about what the product could do.

What it does not establish is whether the workstation was bought or the function ever enabled. The 2022 staff report’s line items name BriefCam software without naming a module, and nothing else we read settles it. That gap is now the first request in this county’s records queue.

The datasheet in the packet

Attached to the 2022 item is BriefCam’s own product datasheet, which says much the same thing in marketing form.

It offers “Accurate face recognition for rapidly pinpointing persons included or excluded in watchlists, based on images extracted from existing video or data uploads”, license plate recognition through watchlists, appearance similarity search to “Instantly locate people, vehicles, and other items of interest by searching for objects with similar attributes”, and real-time alerts triggered by face recognition.^[3]

A datasheet is not a deployment. What a product can do is not what a city bought or turned on, and this page does not claim Nampa runs facial recognition. What the record establishes is narrower and still worth knowing: the city’s own procurement document proposed facial recognition for the police department, the council approved the purchase, and the vendor documentation in front of it described face recognition and watchlists as standard features.

Whether the module was licensed, whether it has ever been enabled, and what policy would govern it if it were, are the questions this page cannot answer.