In its ongoing effort to provide excellent service, the Redlands Police Department wants to partner with residents to add a powerful investigative tool that will enable officers to save time and identify criminal suspects more quickly. To streamline RPD’s ability to hold accountable those who are intent on committing crime, RPD is implementing the Surveillance Monitoring Initiative for Law Enforcement (S.M.I.L.E.), which will enable authorities to more quickly determine where video surveillance systems exist that may have captured an image of a suspect or vehicle involved in a crime.
The goal of the S.M.I.L.E. program is ultimately to deter crime and promote public safety and collaboration by registering private video surveillance cameras with the Redlands Police Department. Surveillance camera footage is an invaluable asset in addressing crime, establishing leads and identifying suspects.
Registering your camera with the Redlands Police Department’s S.M.I.L.E. program will add another element in the department’s overall crime prevention strategy. Similar programs have already proven successful with other agencies across the nation.
Voluntarily registering your information does NOT provide the Redlands Police Department with direct access to your camera, or the ability to view your footage without your consent. Registering for the S.M.I.L.E program simply provides Redlands Police officers with contact information to reach you if a crime occurs in the vicinity of your property. Officers can only view your camera footage if you provide permission and release it directly to us. Detectives or officers will simply contact you if they believe your camera may have captured footage relevant to a criminal investigation.
All S.M.I.L.E. program information is kept confidential. Residents and business owners who currently have cameras, or are looking to purchase cameras, can fill out the registration form to register their cameras with the S.M.I.L.E. program. It only takes about a minute to register.
In the last few months, using license plate reading technology, RPD has identified many vehicles that were driven by suspects who committed burglaries, robberies and other types of theft. RPD encourages anybody who has a surveillance camera system to have at least one camera capture the street area to the front of their residence. If you or one of your neighbors become the victim of a crime in your neighborhood, any footage that captures the getaway vehicle may be crucial in enabling officers to identify the suspects.