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.

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...