Smith and Wesson establishes public safety technologies division

17 Jun 2002

When Smith and Wesson was founded in 1852, revolvers were high technology in the field of public safety. The company's emphasis on fighting crime has now expanded it in the direction of facial recognition algorithms and has led to the establishment of a separate Public Safety Technologies Division.

The Public Safety Technologies Division was established April 30, acknowledging the 14 products geared for identification of suspects. The products consist of two categories: a 13-product suite of identification developments for investigative, administration, and training purposes that allow identification procedures to be performed on a computer; and an electronic booking system which captures images and fingerprints digitally along with adding the suspect's biographical and penal code information.

Another Smith and Wesson development in April was the announcement of the Automated Suspect Identification System (ASID) which combines a search engine, the company's Identi-Kit composite feature compiler, and the electronic booking system.

Smith and Wesson began its commitment to public safety in 1852 with a gun called the Model 1. In 1920 the company produced its first pair of handcuffs. In 1972 Smith and Wesson purchased Identi-Kit from Townsend Engineering, who had developed the manual composite features kit in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

The manual overlays were replaced with a computerized version in 1993, and last year Smith and Wesson introduced the Windows version of Identi-Kit.

Identi-Kit had been the core of the company's high-technology products for the past 26 years, but the facial composite based on witness description was passive, relying on others to match a description with a suspect.

ASID is pro-active; it takes a composite and searches against a digital image data base to find people who look like the composite using a pattern recognition engine based on facial characteristics.

"This gives you a very powerful tool that has not been available to law enforcement," said Warren Tomek, the director of Smith and Wesson's Public Safety Technologies Division.

Another Massachusetts-based company called Viisage also has a facial recognition program, but Viisage's Face ID software is based on eigenvalues while Smith and Wesson's ASID is based on holographic template theory.

The pattern recognition technology for ASID came from work by the U.S. government for satellite surveillance, where satellites look for specific objects on the ground.

"Really what they're searching for is particular signatures or patterns," said Tomek. "You're now seeing that technology employed for other applications outside of the space program."

Development of ASID began last year. "Smith and Wesson is very well-recognized in the law enforcement field. It was only a natural that we extend our products in that field beyond what we have," noted Tomek. "We're trying to capitalize on that."

ASID uses a search engine located on shared PC data base to send a find composite and send results via modem to the server. The output of the search ranks the order of probability of likeness between the input composite information and the digital images contained in the data base. A threshold is set to send only images above that threshold, reducing the number of photos which need to be shown to a victim or witness.

ASID can also search a composite against a data base for booking verification to see if a suspect has a prior record, allowing law enforcement officials the ability to base characteristics on the suspect's face rather than on a name which may be an alias.

A pilot test site for ASID is in place in central Connecticut, and plans are to expand with the idea of a regional network setup with participating departments sharing a larger data base.

"The reason why we're focusing on the regional network is that most of the crime that's done today is done by the repeat offenders who live locally," said Tomek, noting that national data bases are more difficult to set up and administer.

Smith and Western's marketing strengths include the fact that they already have over 3,000 customers in the law enforcement field and are in a position to offer other products. They also have a couple of business partners who are part of the marketing and sales program. Law Enforcement Systems Development consists of four active police officers who developed computer programs due to the need to receive products which are designed for the process of actual activity, and c.w. Costello and Associates, inc., is a national management information systems consulting firm.

The Public Safety Technologies Division currently has five employees at the Springfield, Massachusetts, facility, where corporate headquarters are also located, and seven instructors who perform training throughout the United States. Smith and Wesson has a total employment of about 900.

"There's a real opportunity there for us. One of the things law enforcement is finding today to be more efficient and more effective in their planning is the ability to use high technology," said Tomek, who notes that the challenge is to develop products which meet that need.