At HPE Discover in Las Vegas, Techzine TV sits down with Ross Bourgeois, director of the Real-Time Crime Center in New Orleans. He explains how a city-wide network of more than 2,000 cameras is tied into the 911 dispatch system to deliver live situational awareness to officers and first responders the moment a call is logged, without operators needing to know where every camera is located.
Bourgeois walks through the technical backbone of the operation: a scalable petabyte-class on-premise storage environment, a Metro Ethernet backhaul for the majority of camera feeds, and managed modular HPE Aruba switching. He also discusses how private-sector partners such as the National World War II Museum and the New Orleans Convention Center federate their own camera systems into the platform, expanding coverage without additional city-owned hardware.
The conversation covers the center’s biggest technical challenge, retrieving the right footage quickly from terabytes of continuously overwritten video data, and explores where AI-powered video analytics and vector search could help in the future, including why local ordinances currently restrict the use of characteristic tracking and identification tools, and how the center is prepared to deploy compliant solutions if those regulations change.
• Incident-based alerting bridges the video management system and the CAD/911 dispatch system automatically
• Over 2,000 cameras monitored; roughly half city-owned, the rest federated from large enterprise partners
• Pre-archival video stored for 30 days on a storage environment scalable to 1 petabyte
• Primary network backhaul runs on HFC Metro Ethernet; switching managed through modular Aruba hardware
• Phase 1 of an HPE technology refresh completed; self-driving network capabilities planned for a future phase
• AI and vector search interest exists, but local ordinances currently prohibit characteristic tracking tools
• The center has operated since 2017 and acts as an artificial force multiplier for field responders
0:14 – Introduction to New Orleans’ Real-Time Crime Center
0:47 – How the incident-based alert system works
1:41 – 911 integration and real-time support for field responders
3:01 – Video archiving: 30-day lookback for investigators
3:20 – Private sector camera federations and partnerships
4:38 – Storage, networking, and Aruba switching infrastructure
5:33 – HPE technology refresh and the path to a self-driving network
7:12 – Biggest technical challenge: finding the right video fast
7:59 – AI and video analytics: possibilities and local ordinance limits
Real-Time Crime Center, New Orleans, HPE Discover, Aruba switching, public safety technology, video surveillance infrastructure, petabyte storage, 911 integration, CAD system, HFC Metro Ethernet, self-driving network, AI video analytics, enterprise camera federation