Central forms alliance with city to increase police effectiveness

ADDISON, Texas—Dallas-based Stealth Monitoring has formed what it calls a unique strategic alliance with the city of Addison, Texas to help better protect the local businesses monitored by Stealth.

According to Stealth sales manager Rick Charney, the partnership will lead to reduced false alarms, better protection for end users and saved time and money for participating municipalities.

“We're monitoring cameras for the private businesses, filtering the information and giving the police valuable data on suspicious and unusual activity in progress, without wasting their time. That's revolutionary, nationwide,” Charney said. “We're providing a video control center. And smaller cities like Addison can't afford something like that, even though they'd love to have all the video data. That's what we're bringing to them. We're better protecting private businesses by pushing video footage of suspicious activity directly to the police.”

Charney said Stealth did not charge the city to install the monitoring equipment at Addison PD headquarters where screened video footage from Stealth's clients' cameras would be received and viewed. Police dispatchers then decide whether to push the live video on to patrol cars via PDA, laptop, or smartphone.

“This program puts Addison on the cutting edge of technology that will make our city safer and our police officers more effective,” said Ron Davis, Addison chief of police, in a press release. “In today's tough economic times a program that provides our department with state-of-the-art technology, monitoring services and video monitoring equipment at no cost to taxpayers made this a win-win proposal.”

Charney said Stealth had no plans to stop its municipal-level program in Addison.

“We're currently looking to increase awareness among other Addison businesses and businesses nationwide who want us to propose this solution to their local police department,” Charney said. “We installed the system at the Addison police office and did it free of charge and are looking forwarding to working with other police departments to see whether we can provide a free system to them.”

Davis also noted an increase in the use of such technologies would continue to benefit the public.

“As more businesses and other venues take advantage of this type of technology our dispatchers and police officers will be able to respond more quickly and effectively making it harder for criminals to commit crimes or get away with crimes they have committed,” Davis said in the release.