DVRs for Cop Cars

AEton writes "News.com is reporting that IBM is developing digital video recorders for cop cars. The systems involve a digital video camera and reusable hard drives which police officers will take with them on their shifts; centralized servers with up to 3.5 TB of storage will hold recordings. The cameras continuously record and cache old video in a "Tivo-like" fashion; tapes will start from three to five minutes before the cop turned on the recorder. Unbiased, high-quality recording could have a compelling social effect; and at the very least, we're headed for HDTV Cops."

Comments

Re:We Need Good Watermarking

[Pharmboy]

It strikes me that a really good watermarking technology is needed before this type of technology will be truly trustworthy. Imagine a Rodney King scenario, but since the cops have it on digital video they could "edit in" some attack footage before the beating starts. Call me paranoid, but it would be possible.

It would be pretty damn hard to 'edit in' the person striking first, but there is an easier way. The cops can just carry a bulk tape eraser and a power inverter for the cig lighter, then wipe out the hard drive after they get midevil on someone's ass. Or a 5# speaker magnet. That should cook the hard drive if used properly. Then just say "I dunno what happened to the system, it should be there to prove I didn't do anything".

Re:We Need Good Watermarking

[NanoGator]

"Imagine a Rodney King scenario, but since the cops have it on digital video they could "edit in" some attack footage before the beating starts. Call me paranoid, but it would be possible. "

Paranoid. :)

First off, if you do the math, it's about 700 megs per hour of footage, as opposed the 13 gig it'd take to losslessly compress it. In order to edit somebody in, the video'd have to be recompressed, and that would be noticable upon analysis.

Secondly, it is *very* hard to digitally add/replace somebody in a video. Professional studios have difficulty doing thing, it's inconcievable that the police could cover something up that way. They wouldn't have the talent on their own and the money needed to do it enough to not raise eyebrows would raise eyebrows.

It'd actually be easier to pull that off with plain old VHS camcorders. You can duplicate them without too much quality loss. (Or at least noticable.) The video's lower res and fuzzier so it'd be easy to mask effects. The higher the resolution and color accuracy of video, the harder it is to satisfactorally match it.

I wouldn't worry.

Re:Einstein would be impressed.

[The_K4]

Why not put in a HDD big enough for a WHOLE shift? Then make the drives external and changeable, at the start of a shift the cops insert the drive. It records the whole shift (including all radio traffic). At the end of the shift the WHOLE thing is stored somewhere. This could be seen as a bit of envasion of privacy, but could also protect them in court. There's no way that could really "edit" the tape with it showing.

I want one for my car. Here's why

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a friend who was driving along, when a car slightly ahead of him changed lines right into him. Both cars quite damaged. The two drivers get out of the cars. The other guy says "It's ok, it's ok. I'm a cop. It's your fault." And that's basically what happened. The guy lied his ass off and because he's a cop he was believed, regardless of the (admittedly inconclusive) evidence.

If in this scenario I would LOVE to have a recoding of the guy swerving into me. He'd tell his story, I'd show the tape, and have PROOF of the cop lying his ass off.

It would also be good for non-cop related asshole lying accident scenarios.

Gaming the Recorder and Black Boxes

[hndrcks]

After reading everyone's suggestions on how a policeman who did something questionable might want to 'game the system'; i.e., get the disc to record over the problem moments...

I wonder what will happen when they put REALLY big drives in these things that record the whole shift. More police cars unfortunately running off the road and exploding in flames, I suppose (with the drivers miraculously saved.)

Another thing that came to mind - this device could be the equivalent of a 'black box' on an airplane - you could have BlueTooth enabled guns / batons, health montoring devices in the uniform... this could bring a whole new level of evidence to bear in a Rodney-King style event. What if the police could show from a EKG strip that the cop really was scared for his life? Interesting stuff...

Re:Gaming the Recorder and Black Boxes

[Anonymous Coward]

Certain of the cops taser guns (the caution orange gunshaped ones) record at what time and how many times the trigger was pulled and for how long. All so you can go back and review if the officer used appropriate force and to guard against criminals saying that they were juiced beyond the time justified.

Re:Gaming the Recorder and Black Boxes

[reemul]

The outcome I really hope to see is tied to the "record when the flashers are turned on". Currently, cops who get tired of obeying all of those tedious traffic laws they ticket everyone else for just flash the lights, get past the blockage, then turn off the lights and go on with their lives. Logging each and every use of emergency signals will cut down this abuse - if they have to justify why they hit the shiny red button, they will probably stop hitting it unless it really is needed.

I'm pretty pro-police, but seeing a cop, bored with waiting at an intersection, just decide to put on the magic blinking lights and run the light makes me insane. Casual abuse of this authority makes the public less supportive, may occasionally lead to the police seeing what other small privileges their uniform can get them, and makes drivers less obedient to emergency signals. If most every time I see a cop with his lights on (and he's not after me!) its because he is abusing the privilege rather than in a real emergency, I'll be far less likely to put any effort into getting out of the way. Not really safe, but that is what happens when cops (and firefighters and EMTs and all sorts of others with light rigs) abuse the system.

I suspect this isn't an intended consequence of such an automatic monitoring system, but it's one I'm in favor of.

-reemul

Did this where I worked

[phorm]

Basically we had a system hooked up to a digital camera that recorded to temporary files. If something tripped off a sensor, it was configured to save the previous X moments of video rather than dumping the cache file. Really, it makes sense, since for spontaneous events you really want what happened to get your attention, not necessarily what happens afterwards (or both).

As for the duration of recording... wouldn't it be nice if the recordings weren't viewable by the officers on duty. That way, it could be juggled to a little over 5 minutes (or a lot over), and anyone trying to "wait out" before pressing record would be S.O.L.

Constant recording and the effects of downtime

[Thing 1]

My vote is for them to constantly be recording, and save older recordings to DVD-R (if the hard drives start to fill up). With the rapid advance of hard drives (there was an article here saying they improved 10,000-fold over the last decade or so, IIRC), and the opposite advances in video compression (DIVX/XVID et al), there should be no reason not to record everything.

Then it will be mighty suspicious if a cop's video "suddenly breaks." Perhaps two independent recorders would be called for?

My wife was visiting a friend in Brazil recently, and they were staying at a hotel. Her friend was accosted one night by a security guard who had red eyes and was acting funny (likely he smoked pot), and hit on her and put his arm against the wall, blocking her path. He followed her up to her room.

She has a friend who is a cop, and he was with her that night just prior to dropping her off; he has the receipt from the restaurant they ate at, marking the exact time they left, and they went directly to the hotel. Strangely, ALL VIDEO stopped working that night.

Which is actually better for my wife's friend: now the hotel has broken two laws, a sexual harassment as well as a federal law of destroying evidence. I hope she wins.

We're entering the strage era of having no privacy outside the home (and little privacy inside, as cops use thermal imaging to detect tomato growers). If we're going to record, I think it best that we record everything, especially all government employees -- including politicians, police, and military. As others have said, these recordings will reduce police corruption.

And if we recorded politicians 24/7, we'd end the era of "big oil" deals, and RIAA/MPAA-mandated legislation, and all sorts of crap that goes on in back rooms that nobody ever hears about.

personal exp with cop cams

[Flunitrazepam]

I was with a friend who was pulled over for a suposed DUI, when he had been drinking nothing but water. The police officer made him do the field sobriety test, which he completed without a problem. Then they arrested him for DUI for apparently no reason. To fight the charge later he wanted his lawyer to get a copy of the cop car tapes that showed him doing the sobriety test. The lawyer said that quite simply the police in this area stopped using them, because it was causing them to LOSE too many cases. Eventually the blood test came back 0.0 so the charge was dropped, but any action against the officer was more or less impossible due to lack of evidence, no video.

Re:We Need Good Watermarking

[RatBastard]

Have you ever sucessfully used a magnet to destroy a hard drive? Most bulk erase magnets don't have the power. Hell, most degausing magnets don't. The metal casing does wonders to protect the drive.

I have managed to use magnets to wipe a hard drive. It took a damned powerful magnet and a LOT of time. It's not as easy as everyone thinks it it is.

Is this admissable as evidence?

[default luser]

That would be my biggest question, since the digital format is an order of magnitude easier to seamlessly edit than analog media.

Re:A few comments

[NanoGator]

" No statements about the compression algorithm used were made in the article."

They said 3.5 terabytes of storage held 5,000 hours of footage. Doing the math I arrived at 700 megs per hour. I am not a mathematician so if I messed up a decimal point then somebody please correct me. Assuming my math is right, then the only possible way they're storing the footage is to use a codec, likely of MPEG4 relation. (DivX maybe?)

"Second: 13 gigs/hour at 720x480 (DVD quality) is not uncompressed. It's compressed DV, which is (I believe) a variant of Motion JPEG. "

I damn near argued with you on this point, but I decided to verify your claim about it being MPEG based compression before doing that. Glad I did because you're right! DV is probably MPEG related which means that it is a lossy codec. I didn't know that. I've read a million times that it's a lossless codec. However, I did an experiment, and you do lose quality every time you compress with DV. I'm *very* glad you mentioned that because now I know not to use that as an archival format. I guess the reason that myth is about is that you can copy the DV video from tape to tape without generation loss. That's absolutely true. You don't have to de/recompress to transfer the footage. Damn, I've been reading a DV mag a lot lately and never latched on to that detail. *grump* In any case, my claim that it was lossless was wrong. That probably negates that whole point there. (Maybe... the difference wasn't noticable without heavy analysis.)

I never meant to imply that the 13 gigs/hour number was uncompressed. That's the native format of digital video cameras. They're not going to capture it uncompressed. I don't think you can do that with today's products. (I might be wrong, been a while since I looked that up.)

"Third: Given that laptop hard drives are available in sizes up to 60 GB, it's entirely possible for them to be storing raw DV video. With a 60GB laptop drive, you could store over 5 hours of video without recompressing it. Go to a shock-mounted 3.5" drive and 60GB is SMALL."

Capturing that much footage isn't the problem. The problem is archiving it. If a single officer is capturing 60 gigs of day, you run out of terabytes REAL fast.

Re:I want one.

[K-Man]

It seems like a cheap "this is what really happened" camera would be a boon for people on the road, and insurance companies, etc., would save a lot of litigation of the "I didn't rear end him, he backed into me on the freeway" kind.

I know there's one guy in New York who rides a bike with cameras fore and aft, but I think they're on a conventional portable VTR.

Re:Sorry to dissapoint.

[dbrutus]

The problem with these old fashioned techniques is that not hitting record at the start of an incident will be against regulations. In that case starting a record session in the middle when there are cries of police brutality will be sure to get the jury to both get the prisoner off and also end the cop's career.

There are likely other ways to get around this (the fact that the cop has physical control of the hard drive sounds promising) but dirty cops will have to have an entirely new level of sophistication to get around the system.

In short it's going to clean things up for a while at a minimum.

I want one!

[Ben Hutchings]

The number of illegal and dangerous manouevres I see every week is significant, and I doubt that this is specific to where I live. I was pondering the idea of having a DVR like this and passing on recordings to the police (and volunteering as a witness to attest to the locations, times and accuracy of the recordings). It isn't going to happen any time soon, especially given that I'm going around on a bike not in a car, but maybe some time in the future it will be practical to fit DVRs to vehicles. The mere fact that they are commonplace would, I hope, act as a deterrent against the sort of crappy driving that people mostly get away with now. (Bad cyclists are another matter; without registration plates it's going to be hard to identify them. They're mostly a danger to themselves, though.)