Schaumburg adding more crime-spotting cameras to retail district
Schaumburg police will add more cameras for their Real-Time Information Center to monitor this winter, through a $290,000 Organized Retail Crime Grant approved by the Illinois Attorney General’s office.
Village trustees this week authorized a $255,747 purchase of building-mounted aerial cameras from Aurora-based Scientel Solutions, LLC. They will be installed in the retail district surrounding Woodfield Mall.
The police department also plans to purchase additional Automated License Plate Recognition cameras for the southern part of the village, where many vehicles enter and exit the Elgin-O’Hare Tollway, Chief Bill Wolf said.
The grant and Schaumburg’s imminent installation of more cameras for its two-year-old Real-Time Information Center takes aim at more increasing and more aggressive instances of retail theft.
“This has been a trend across the country,” Wolf said. “We’ve been fairly fortunate to not have any violent-type ones. This (grant) will fill in some additional gaps in the Woodfield area.”
The Real-Time Information Center was created with a $552,000 federal grant allocated through Cook County. It integrates all the police department’s resources and data into one system, including video from village cameras, those of participating businesses, license-plate readers, live traffic data, dispatch data, weather conditions, and GPS mapping of on-duty police and fire department personnel.
In the past two years, there have been more than 500 successful uses of the center, Wolf said.
The most high-profile occurred last month, when the armed robbery of a woman with a young child was spotted in the Woodfield parking lot. It led to the immediate tracking and pursuit of the suspect and his vehicle, all the way to his arrest in Oak Brook.
Other cases have included determining who’s at fault for traffic accidents - including one in which the driver and a passenger changed places - and locating a misplaced car thought stolen from a large parking lot.
The presence of numerous tall buildings in northeast Schaumburg has allowed the cameras, which can zoom and be turned in many directions, to offer the aerial vantage point of a helicopter, Wolf said.
“I think that’s one of the reasons why these have been so effective in the Woodfield area,” he added.
The cameras have proven to be preventative as well, with the center’s operators able to spot and address the beginnings of fights or suspicious behavior, Wolf said.
The cameras also have been used for storm-watching during severe weather alerts in the spring and summer.
The village expects all the new equipment to be installed by the end of March. The purchases are part of the first two phases of an envisioned six-phase expansion of the Real-Time Information Center’s capabilities, Wolf said.