Military property trespassing charges are won and lost on seven fields in the footage, not on whether the cameras were rolling.

The controlling statute is 18 USC 1382, titled Entering military, naval, or Coast Guard property. It covers two distinct acts. The first is entering a military reservation, post, fort, arsenal, yard, station, or installation for any purpose prohibited by law or lawful regulation. The second, which is where most charged cases sit, is re-entering or being found within the installation after having been removed or ordered not to reenter by the officer or person in command. The maximum penalty is a fine, imprisonment of not more than six months, or both. The second clause, the re-entry clause, requires the prosecutor to prove a barment letter was served and that the defendant knowingly came back onto the same installation. Both facts usually come from CCTV footage, not from officer testimony alone, because the officer who served the barment letter is rarely the officer who finds the defendant on the installation weeks later.

A barment letter, sometimes called a bar letter or debarment order, is a written order from the installation commander (or a delegate such as a Provost Marshal or Staff Judge Advocate) prohibiting a named person from entering the installation, or specific buildings or zones on the installation, for a defined period. Types range from temporary (a few days) to a fixed term (up to three years) to indefinite. For the 1382 re-entry prosecution to hold, the CCTV clip has to place the defendant inside the specific geography the barment letter named, on a date after the letter was served, with a timestamp tight enough to tie to a specific camera and zone. Footage that shows a person crossing the main gate perimeter is not the same evidentiary item as footage that shows the same person standing in the exact parking lot or housing loop the letter barred. The letter defines the scope. The footage has to match the scope field by field.

Most get dropped on two preventable evidentiary gaps. The first is the knowledge element: Fourth Circuit and other federal courts have dismissed 1382 charges where the government could not establish probable cause that the defendant knew they were entering the barred area. The second is the footage itself. On a typical 8-channel 3-year-retention DVR in privatized military family housing, pulling a single clip of a specific person at a specific gate in a 48 hour window can run 4 to 6 hours of manual scrub time per officer. When the installation police or contracted MPH security only get a tip two or three days later, the clip has often rolled off, or the time pressure means they give up before they find it. The system that lost the case was the retrieval workflow, not the camera. A footage index that understands natural language queries over the existing DVR is what closes that gap.

Seven fields, and all of them need to show on the exported clip or the adjacent metadata packet. One, a frame-level timestamp synced to a trusted time source, because the barment letter has an effective date and the prosecution has to prove the re-entry was after it. Two, the camera identifier, because the zone that the clip shows has to match the zone the letter named. Three, a person-level dwell record, i.e. how long the same detection track remained in the zone, because transient passage can sometimes be defended and deliberate loitering cannot. Four, a zone label (for example, east-gate-pedestrian or family-housing-loop-3) tied to the geography the letter defined. Five, an event class (pre_action_zone_entry, loitering_dwell_exceeded) so the investigator can triage. Six, the DVR or NVR layout at capture, because multiview layouts that change during the event introduce ambiguity. Seven, a tile thumbnail, because the JAG paralegal assembling the packet works from thumbnails before pulling the full export. A Cyrano event payload carries all seven by default, produced on-device, no cloud round-trip.

Cyrano is a 2-minute install edge AI device that plugs into the existing DVR or NVR over HDMI. It takes the composite multiview the DVR is already outputting to the guard monitor, runs per-tile detection on it, keeps a per-frame layout_id so it knows which camera is which across layout changes, and emits events with the seven fields listed above. There is no RTSP negotiation, no ONVIF discovery, no camera firmware change, no network re-architecture. On the privatized military family housing portfolios where the on-site system is a 6-to-10 year old Hikvision, Dahua, Lorex, Uniview, or Night Owl DVR driving a single HDMI out to the leasing office, Cyrano reads that HDMI and does the rest. One unit supports up to 25 camera feeds. No footage leaves the property.

The natural-language layer is a retrieval tool, not a substitute for the underlying DVR recording. When an MP investigator types a query like man in red jacket near the east gate between 02:00 and 04:00, Cyrano returns candidate clips drawn from the DVR's own recorded feed, with the full seven-field payload attached. The export the prosecutor attaches to the packet is the DVR's own native file (or a frame-accurate transcode of it), not an AI-generated reconstruction. The AI layer narrows the search from tens of thousands of frames to a short list. The evidentiary chain still terminates at the DVR, which is the same chain a court has already accepted in prior trespass and burglary prosecutions on installation and off. Nothing about the retrieval method changes the admissibility of the source recording.

Yes, and it is the single largest concrete use case. Privatized family housing on installations is usually operated under a Military Housing Privatization Initiative partnership with a private landlord such as Balfour Beatty Communities, Lendlease, Lincoln Military Housing, Hunt Military Communities, or Corvias. Those properties sit inside the installation perimeter for 1382 jurisdiction purposes, but the day-to-day CCTV system is usually the same consumer-grade DVR/NVR stack the rest of the Class B/C multifamily industry runs. A barred resident or ex-resident who returns to the family housing loop is a 1382 re-entry case that runs through installation law enforcement and the Staff Judge Advocate. The footage collection problem on those properties is identical to the footage collection problem on any 150-unit apartment complex, which is the problem Cyrano was built to solve.

Under 60 seconds from query to first candidate clip is the target band, on a property-size DVR (8 to 32 channels, 2 to 8 TB of retention). The key is that the index Cyrano maintains is on the same edge device the inference runs on. The query does not hit a cloud service, so there is no upload, no backlog, and no rate limit. Compared to a manual scrub of 48 hours of 16-channel recording, which routinely runs 4 to 6 hours per officer, that is roughly a 200x reduction in the evidence retrieval step. On a portfolio where MPH security and the installation Provost Marshal both work from the same export, getting the clip down from an afternoon to a minute is often the difference between a case that gets charged and a case that gets dropped for stale evidence.

Since April 2025, DOJ has filed 4,700+ novel Title 50 misdemeanor charges against migrants for entering military zones established at the southern border. Those charges are distinct from 18 USC 1382 but rely on the same evidentiary spine: footage that proves knowing entry into a zone the defendant was on notice of. Reporting has documented dismissals where the criminal complaint failed to establish probable cause of knowledge. The same footage-field hygiene that sustains a 1382 re-entry charge (synced timestamp, zone label, dwell record, camera identity) is what a Title 50 charge is going to live or die on. Cyrano is not involved in that enforcement context, but the evidentiary checklist is the same one this page lays out, because the underlying question (can the footage answer the knowledge element) is identical.

Under 30 minutes per property, per the product's own deployment contract. Plug the device into the DVR's HDMI out, connect to the property network, draw the alert zones (gates, family housing loops, parking lots) through the dashboard, and the unit begins indexing. On a portfolio roll out across a MHPI operator, the time-to-live on a given property is an afternoon, not a quarter. No camera replacement, no IT team, no rewiring, no contractor. Hardware is a one-time $450, software is $200 per month. For comparison, one installation-contracted security guard for a family housing loop runs $3,000 to $5,000 per month per post.