- June 15, 2025
-
-
Loading
Loading
Less than a month after the four new workstations hummed to life in Sarasota Police Department’s Real-Time Operations Center came its first high-profile test.
At approximately 8:30 p.m. on Feb, 10, 2025, a car driven by 72-year-old June Fenton crashed into Taylor Bennett and her two children — 2-year-old Rio and 5-month-old Kiylan — as they were crossing U.S. 301, killing the children at the scene and leaving Taylor in a coma for two months before succumbing to her injuries.
Fenton fled the scene and went into hiding in her home.
Within 48 hours, the Real-Time Operations Center identified her as the suspect and, after an investigation, SPD arrested her on March 3.
Immediately following the incident, the center’s four technicians and manager John Lake sprung into action, tapping into some of the latest law enforcement technology to solve the crime.
It all started with a piece of Fenton’s car found at the scene,
"One of the traffic homicide officers at the scene found a part of what he believed was a Lexus," Lake said. “We started digging into that piece and were able to determine it was from a white Lexus.”
That’s not much to go on, but it was enough.
A search of vehicle registration records found there were 450 white Lexus cars in Sarasota County. From there, the investigation turned to license plate recognition (LPR) cameras located throughout the city.
“We were able to narrow that down to 50 white Lexuses that touched those cameras within a five-hour period of the crash,” Lake said. “One of the analysts saw one that after the crash kind of disappeared. It was hitting all the LPRs weeks before the crash and then none of them after the crash for two days.”
The plate matched to Fenton’s address, and a dispatched detective went to the home where he observed through an open garage door a white Lexus with a smashed windshield. The car was impounded, processed and determined to be the vehicle that crashed into the young family.
“Let’s say it took us a week to find that car,” Lake said. “If we weren't operating this center, she could have already taken it to a body shop and had it repaired. Without us working on this for two solid days, anything could have happened.”
Soon after implementation, the new center also helped solve, within 48 hours, a road rage case in which someone in a black sedan shot twice into another black vehicle. With two bullet holes in her car, the victim could only describe the color of the suspect’s car.
Video provided by a homeowner captured the incident and provided enough of a blurred image of a Honda Civic, which started the investigation by narrowing suspects by license plate and travel pattern. The center detected the prime suspect leaving the city toward the east, returning a short time later.
“We sent detectives and the suspect ended up confessing to it,” Lake said. “He admitted the gun was in the house, so they recovered the gun and he was charged. We didn’t have much to go on, and this was done in two days. They might not have ever found it if not for this technology, and if they did, it might be a week or two later.”
Those examples are investigations after the fact. An example of real-time assistance occurred just last week when SPD executed a successful high-risk nighttime search warrant.
“We had body cams up for our SWAT team, which was executing the warrant. We had drone footage up so we're watching live body cam footage from the SWAT team as they're executing the warrant and drone footage of overhead with a night vision view,” said Support Services Division Capt. Demetri Konstantopoulos. “As command staff, we're able to monitor how everything is transpiring in real time and if something were to go awry, we could make decisions from here."
Sarasota Police Rex Troche pitched the operations center to the Sarasota City Commission as part of its fiscal year 2025 budget, $690,581 for the first two phases, with a mission to leverage existing technology to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of law enforcement responses.
The opening of the first phase coincides with SPD’s acquisition of its new $1 million mobile command center in February.
“It started with the Chief Troche’s vision and he tasked the entire department to leverage technology to help make Sarasota a safer place,” Konstantopoulos said. “Over the last year, we've done that. “We're still building this thing out. We don't even have all the software yet, but this is the hub for all of our technology and we've had immediate success on high-profile cases.”
Situated on the second floor in a former community room are four workstations arranged in a circular pattern, each with three monitors covering live cameras throughout the city. Many are city-owned cameras, but the ops center can tap into private cameras, with the owners’ permission, as well. Technicians can monitor the cameras during special events and at public venues — there are 50 at the Sarasota County Fairgrounds, for example — as well as the new school zone speed cameras.
They can also monitor officers’ body-worn cameras and drones to provide guidance in real time and locate officers nearest to a scene to dispatch backup faster than an officer can request it.
“We're looking to do things in minutes, not hours or days,” Lake said. “We can live tap into an officer if we want to. We can go right in there if we hear him calling for help We can go in and watch his body cam on the call.”
Noise monitors, which can move throughout the city, can pinpoint exact locations of gunshots and nuisance noises. The LPRs can track suspect vehicle movements in real time or after the fact or — as in the Fenton case — suspiciously no movement at all.
By mid-summer, Lake said, the space will look entirely different with the installation of the first phase of a video wall, which will allow technicians to cast their screens for investigators to view. The second phase installation, which is scheduled for 2026, with two more workstations. All six arranged in two rows of three, plus high-top seating for pertinent personnel needing to view operations — such as monitoring execution of a search warrant — as it happens.
More screens will come in future phases, “because the video wall gets pretty expensive,” Lake said.
The entire build out will be three phases, each about $300,000 according to Konstantopoulos. It currently employs four technicians, six when fully staffed with overlapping shifts.
When not assisting with live operations or investigations, the technicians monitor cameras throughout the city, assisting in the red light and school speed zone programs.
