NOPTIC Spotlight Camera System: Seeing What the Light Doesn't

There you are on patrol, at night – as we all are half the time – and you’re searching for a suspect.  He committed an armed robbery and ran into this wooded area that has plenty of underbrush.  As you sweep your spotlight back and forth, seeing nothing but mottled shades of green mixed in with the wood brown, you can’t help but wonder what you’re NOT seeing.  Is he right there?  Does he have a gun pointed at you as you drive by?  Have you ever wondered what you could see if you just had an infrared or thermal viewing system built into that spotlight?

A call for a burglary in progress goes out and while you’re enroute dispatch tells you that the subject has been spooked and is reportedly running toward the carport end of the house.  The yard is almost completely fenced in and if the suspect is going to flee the property he’ll either have to go over the fence or come out the end of the driveway – which you can easily see.  You shine your spotlight around on the shrubbery but all you see is the shrubbery.  Is he hiding in there?  Better call the K9 team and have them come clear the area, right?

As a patrol officer I was often envious of the helicopters that had infrared and thermal vision devices.  It seemed a no-brainer to me that we’d catch a lot more bad guys who ran and hid from us if we could simply see them in the dark.  Instead, we brought light to the dark, made the dark then light and looked for the bad guys. What’s the problem with that? Bad guys are like cockroaches: when you shine a bright light in their general vicinity, especially if they’ve just recently been running from you, they scurry for the nearest dark hole. Sometimes that’s behind walls where specialty vision equipment won’t help you see them; but sometimes that’s behind a bush or simply in a dark corner where, if you just had some way of seeing them without having to have light, you’d find them quick and easy.  And since they were still in the dark, you’d have the advantage in any encounter that followed.

Enter the NOPTIC Spotlight Camera System.  A thermal camera that is designed to mount on your spotlight and show you a thermal image of wherever your spotlight is “looking.”  Since we’re all fairly skilled – after our first year on the street anyway – at manipulating our spotlights to point where we want to look, by mounting the camera on top of the spotlight, the NOPTIC System is – by default – looking at the same spot you are; you aimed it by aiming your spotlight.

Now why would you need a thermal imaging system to look at a spot where you’re making the dark bright with white light?  For a couple reasons. First, just because you shine your light there doesn’t mean you can see all that is.  Take a look at the included comparison photo of the subject who hides behind some bushes.  Even with the light shined on the bushes (and therefore him), you can’t see him with regular vision. However, with the thermal imaging of the NOPTIC camera, you can easily see him.  And once you address him – even though he THOUGHT he was well hidden – he knows the jig is up and he needs to surrender.

Second, while we don’t typically drive with our lights off, we DO sometimes search with our lights off, using ambient light to seek our target subjects.  Without turning on your spotlight but using the NOPTIC camera, you could still be searching and seeing the white heat of the subject against the shades of gray and black in all the background (or foreground, depending).

The bottom line is that this is a tool that can benefit law enforcement.  Typically manufactured and sold as a standalone tool intended for use by specialized units, the NOPTIC Spotlight Camera System provides the patrol officer on the street a “specialty” tool that can maximize, or at least amplify, his/her ability to search in unfavorable lighting conditions.

While I saw the system demonstrated at the IACP conference several months ago, I wondered about real world usage or application.  With very little effort I found this news article about how it was used to find a hiding suspect who had stolen a vehicle and then fled on foot after fleeing during a vehicle pursuit.  It describes how valuable the system was in finding the suspect.

On the NOPTIC website itself is a video showing the difference between visibly searching and what the NOPTIC system “sees.”  (See the photo as it’s constructed of two screen captures from the video). I can’t tell you how much I wish we had this technology available to us, as conveniently mounted as putting it on the spotlight, oh… say… about 30 years ago.  I’d have done a lot less searching on foot with my flashlight in my hand, exposed and making a target of myself for the bad guys.

For more information check out their website at http://www.noptic.com. It is a unique system with great potential value for everything from patrol to investigative surveillance.

Stay safe!