Quick Start
Useful in five minutes
Here’s the shortest path from opening the console to doing real work.
1 · Get in
- Explore the demo — the fastest way to look around. No account, the full console, generated data for a sample city.
- Sign in with a city account — your real login. What you can see and do is set by your role.
2 · Learn the layout
- Left rail — the sections you have access to. You only see what your role allows.
- Top search — type any plate, full or partial, from anywhere. Suggestions appear as you type.
- Hit feed (right) — every read the moment a sentry sees it. Hotlist hits outlined in red; watched vehicles in blue.
3 · Do your first three things
- Watch the map. Open Live Map. Green pins are healthy sentries; gold dots are recent reads fading with age; a red ring flashes on a hotlist hit.
- Find a vehicle. In Search, type a plate — or use By description if you only have a color and make — then open a result for its full history and route replay.
- Clear an alert. In Alerts, acknowledge an unacknowledged hit. It’s logged to the audit trail with your name.
Remember the covenant. The city owns the data, controls who sees it, and can destroy it at will. Every search, export, and change is written to an audit trail that can never be altered — so work in the open.
User Guide
By role, and by task
What you can do depends on your role. Below: the four roles, then the everyday tasks and exactly where to do them.
The four roles
| Role | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Read-only | See the data — map, search, vehicles, stats. Makes no changes. |
| User | The everyday operator: acknowledge alerts, manage hotlists, build cases. |
| Lead | Everything a user can do, plus sentry operations and the oversight (Govern) view. |
| Admin | Full control: users, per-section access, retention, and city configuration. |
An admin can also fine-tune any individual’s access section by section — a role is a starting point, not a cage.
Everyday tasks
- Find a vehicle by plate
- Search → By plate, or the top-bar search from anywhere. Partial plates work; click a result to open the vehicle.
- Find a vehicle from a description
- Search → By description (Vehicle Fingerprint). Pick any of color, make, body type, and state — even color alone narrows the field.
- See a vehicle’s history and route
- Vehicles → look up the plate for every sighting, last-seen, and Replay route to watch its path on a timeline.
- Find who a vehicle travels with
- The Co-travelers panel on the vehicle’s page lists vehicles repeatedly seen alongside it — local correlation, no national network.
- Watch for a plate to reappear
- Watch this vehicle on the vehicle’s page; it’s flagged in blue in the hit feed next time it’s seen.
- Manage a hotlist and clear hits
- Alerts: add or remove plates, and acknowledge hits as patrol responds. NCIC/state lists show as read-only, synced entries.
- Build a case
- Cases: open one, attach sightings from any vehicle’s page, and export to CSV — the export is audited.
- Read the numbers
- Stats: traffic by hour, busiest sentries, make/color/state mix, repeat visitors, and hotlist effectiveness.
- Oversight & accountability
- Govern (Lead/Admin): the immutable audit trail, the read-only keys issued to outside organizations, and the retention control.
- Manage people & access
- Access (Admin only): assign roles, toggle each user’s access to each section, and set what each role can do.
Full Manual
Every section and concept
The complete reference.
Sections
- Live Map
- The landing view. Sentry pins colored by health (green online, amber degraded, red offline), a recent-read heat trail that fades with age, and a red ring that flashes on each new hotlist hit. Click a pin for its name, status, and today’s read count.
- Search
- Two modes. By plate — full or partial, optionally narrowed to one sentry, with live type-ahead. By description (Vehicle Fingerprint) — find vehicles by color, make, body type, and state without a plate. Every search is audited.
- Vehicles
- One plate’s complete history in the retention window: attributes, every sighting, last-seen, a Replay route animation, a Co-travelers panel, a Watch toggle, and Attach to case on any sighting.
- Alerts
- Real-time hotlist hits and the hotlists that drive them. Add or remove plates (local lists), acknowledge hits, and see NCIC/state-synced lists as read-only. Each hit also pushes to patrol by SMS and email.
- Stats
- Analytics over the read stream: 24-hour volume, busiest sentries, make/color/state composition, read-confidence distribution, repeat-visitor histogram, and hotlist effectiveness. Aggregates only.
- Cases
- Investigative folders. Reads attach by reference (never copied), each attachment records who and when, and cases export to CSV as an audited action.
- Sentries
- The deployed camera fleet: health, battery or wired power, last heartbeat, and reads today. Maintenance is handled by KEEP — the city never touches a ladder.
- Govern
- The oversight surface (Lead/Admin): the immutable audit trail, the read-only keys issued to outside organizations (scope, expiry, revocable), and the retention control.
- Transparency
- The public accountability page: aggregate activity, retention, and exactly which organizations hold read access. No plates, no locations — embeddable on the city’s own site.
- Access
- Admin only. Assign roles, fine-tune each user’s access per section, and set the permission matrix. This screen can never be granted to a non-admin.
Concepts
- The data path
- A sentry reads a plate on the pole and sends only metadata over cellular to the city’s own cloud. It never joins a national network and is never sold. City staff act on it; the federal government has no back door.
- Roles & access
- Four roles set defaults; an admin can override any user’s access per section. Sections gate on capabilities, so re-assigning what a role can do takes effect everywhere at once.
- The immutable audit trail
- Every search, export, and change is written once and chained so any later tampering is detectable. The audit store is append-only — the platform can add records but can never alter or delete them.
- Retention
- Reads are deleted automatically after the city’s chosen number of days — enforced by the database itself, not by policy. Changing retention is an audited action.
- Data sharing
- Off by default. Any outside access is a read-only, scoped key the city issues and can revoke, listed publicly on the Transparency page. There is no mechanism to sell the data.
- Ownership
- KEEP owns and maintains the cameras and runs the platform. The city owns the data, controls the network, and decides who sees it — and when the contract ends, the data is destroyed and KEEP keeps no copy.