(Trinidad Express) Captured on camera.
This is what National Security Minister Gary Griffith hopes to achieve with a now-functioning network of CCTV cameras that has been in active use since last October to monitor roads, highways and the activity of Trinidadians across the country.
The network of CCTV cameras is already so extensive that it monitors thousands of drivers around the country as well as travellers entering and leaving the country from Piarco International Airport.
The CCTV communications platform was unveiled yesterday during a tour of the recently launched National Operations Centre (NOC) at its Knowsley Building headquarters in Port of Spain.
It was previously located in Riverside Plaza, Port of Spain.
The NOC has become the national focal point for public safety and joint security operations in the country.
It combines the country’s law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, all operating under the same roof to monitor activities around the country by camera, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
NOC operations involve the Police Service, Fire Service, Defence Force and the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Management (ODPM).
It is currently using the national CCTV initiative controlled by the police, which feeds real-time video into the NOC. The NOC also monitors rapid-response police vehicles to ensure they are operating within the zones to which they are assigned.
Security monitoring will also increase shortly with the inclusion of video from national security helicopters.
Data from the Coast Guard’s coastal radar system is also being fed to the NOC, and a more direct link with video being channelled straight to the NOC is coming on stream to more effectively monitor the country’s coastline.
It will shortly include Customs, Immigration, the prisons system and members of the country’s intelligence-gathering units.
Invited journalists and publishers were yesterday given a tour of active operations at the NOC, which was established in the middle of last year but became operational in October.
Leading the tour was Griffith, Communications Minister Gerald Hadeed and director of the NOC Commander Garvin Heerah.
The NOC is still only five per cent complete at a cost of $2 million and will not have all systems 100 per cent operational until February 2015, Griffith explained.
