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Cops To Start CrimeTube To Report Offenses
An anonymous reader writes "UK citizens may soon be able to report crimes by uploading videos taken from their mobile phones. Ian Readhead, director of information for the Association of Chief Police Officers, told silicon.com that forces want to build a video reporting portal to allow the public to upload potential evidence. Checking YouTube is now a routine part of many police investigations, he said, and police want to build on the extra functionality that this gives them."
So as a subscriber, I get to see stories before TFA is slashdotted. The preview stories come with this little question: "See any serious problems with this story? Email our on-duty editor." I don't think emailing the Slashdot editors is going to fix the problems I see with this one!
TFA gives the example of a white van involved in some crime. Well, I have a neighbor whose dog barks all night, but drives a brown van. No problem, a little Photoshop here and there, and voilá! "Instant Evidence"! The neighbors dog spends 6-8 months in the kennel while his owner does the same thing.
John
How long before people start using this new tech to make bogus insurance claims??
So what are they going to do when people start uploading videos en masse of the police breaking the law?
Your every action is already videotaped in England.
I think that this will be mostly used to video tape cops doing terrible things and uploading it for all to see. I also can't help but think that it will be largely ignored.
This is brilliant, but I don't know how well it will work.
I tried it out, to see if I could get results. After spending a full day videotaping the dealings of the CEO of a major US company this week, and posting it, the police responded "Well, I mean, we don't really deal with this kind of stuff. Find me a guy who stole some cigarettes or something"
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Orwellian much?
If they had this in the US, I would upload video of my ATT phone/wireless/internet bill.
I don't see any way this could possibly go wrong!
What happens when you upload a video of the police abusing a citizen (assuming you can smuggle your copy out of the situation)? Do they auto-delete or does the spin machine automatically fire up?
I'm more interested in a mobile phone YouTube to report misdeeds and abuses by police officers.
I say that even though most of my interactions with police officers, even if they haven't been necessarily pleasant due to the circumstances, have been professional. It's just that I've been there and seen enough abuses of authority by bad cops to know that when it does happen, the only thing that's going to help you is video evidence.
I wish those nine out ten good cops wouldn't cover for that one bad cop.
My concern is that this will turn into citizens adopting a semi-crazed state of vigilantism. In the States where I'm from people around here take the Neighborhood Watch program WAY too seriously -- 24/7 neighborhood patrols in their cars, radio communications, etc. Now that people can upload possible evidence, I can see people taking a fairly innocent concept to a whole new level -- actively looking for "crimes" and recording the footage. And, what about privacy issues? It would only be a matter of time before people start suspecting their neighbots of "crimes" and put 24/7 surveillance on them.
If this were Chicago the system would eventually become overwhelmed by police crimes.
These evil word bastards are perpetuating non-Cubic myth. Only Dr. Gene Ray, wisest human, can possibly understand the depth and importance of this harmonic system with 4 simultaneous days in a single rotation...
Oh, wait; Crime Tube? Um, err, sorry about that. My bad.
Man, that sucks.
I finally have a server that I can store all my snuff films on!
Now when people upload video evidence of police officers committing crimes and the cops delete them there are TWO crimes committed. Something tells me that this is not going to replace youtube any time soon.
...watch your view counter spin like Orwell in his grave.
You may need to gear it down and use a tachometer. I understand he's starting to fly apart in there.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Exactly what bothers me about such schemes. Your neighbour becomes your possible enemy... divide the people so they cannot possibly move against an oppressive gov't, because they all distrust one another too much.
Cue the "in Soviet Russia" jokes... oh, how about this one??
Subject: KGB
Place and time: Somewhere in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
The phone rings at KGB headquarters.
"Hello?"
"Hello, is this KGB?"
"Yes. What do you want?"
"I'm calling to report my neighbor Yankel Rabinovitz as an enemy of the State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in some fallen trees on his property."
"This will be noted." Next day, the KGB patrol arrives at the Rabinovitz's house. They chop the trees into pieces, but find no diamonds.
Later the phone rings at the Rabinovitz house.
"Hello, Yankel! Did the KGB come?"
"Yes. Did they chop your firewood?"
"Yes, they did."
"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Arguments like yours seem not well thought out to me. Yes you could frame him for a crime. Hell, why not shoot a few people and leave the smoking gun in his garage too?
Well I'll tell you why, because police actually INVESTIGATE a crime. They aren't going to look at one video or piece of evidence, throw him in jail, and call it a day. They are going to look at all the evidence as a body to see what fits...
So what happens when the evidence YOU submitted turns out to be the only information that doesn't mesh with everything else they have collected? They are going to come asking you some tough questions, and if you really tried to frame someone I hope you like sharing rooms with rough men because that's where you are headed.
There's a reason in the past why people generally don't try to make up evidence and video is no exception. Personally I think it's great that people can submit video to help catch criminals if they are too concerned about personal safety to get involved. Wouldn't you rather have user submitted videos of crime submitted by real people than have monitoring cameras everywhere "just in case?". I lean on the side of trusting people in an area to say "hey, there's a problem here".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is there a such a thing as a wireless streaming video camera? Then if you happen to film the cops in some sort of dubious behavior, you can hand over the camera like a good little citizen when the cops ask for it, knowing that the video is safe on a server somewhere miles away?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I don't know how we ever got the idea that police work is particularly dangerous. (Wait...yes I do...from the police!). Police work isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous occupations. Death rate for Loggers about 95 per 100,000 per year, pilots about 90, steel workers about 50. Police are about 6 per 100,000. Only about 1/2 of the police deaths are due to encounters with violent criminals, the rest are things like traffic accidents and heart attacks. We don't condone brutality on citizens by garbage collectors, and their job is 5 times as dangerous as the police.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Nothing is new under the sun...
Orwell of course predicted this type of thing but not quite in the same way. Had he lived a bit longer I'm sure he would have extrapolated emerging technologies to this sort of thing - videotaping people and sending it in.
David Brin did exactly that in his novel Earth. Before the onset of the WWW and when the internet was still in its infancy he extrapolated and predicted people wearing special glasses that could record everything. If they witnessed a crime they could then easily upload the video to the proper authorities with incredible ease.