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Seattle Police Held Hackathon To Redact Footage From Body Cameras
An anonymous reader writes: Hackathons are common these days, but you don't often hear about events hosted by law enforcement. That's what the Seattle Police Department did on Friday, with the solitary goal of finding a good way to redact the video streams taken by police body cameras and dash cameras. Seven different teams demonstrated solutions, but in the end, none thought automation could realistically handle the task in the near future. "The Washington State public records act requires that almost all video filmed by any government agency – including police – be disclosed upon request. The only real exception is for video which is part of an open case currently under investigation. However, various parts of the state code include other restrictions – the identity of minors cannot be disclosed. Requests from victims or witnesses who may be at risk if their identities are disclosed also must be honored. However in all such cases the video still must be released – it is just the faces or other potential identifying characteristics, which might include gender or even a person's gait – which need to be blurred and redacted." The city just started a pilot program for body-worn police cameras.
Dashcams stay on the cruiser which is always in a public space. There is no need to redact that video unless you have something to hide.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
We'd all better become Glassholes really quickly.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The footage should be sent straight to several different server centers across the nation. In these places would be people who are paid to watch police all day. They can flip switches and hold conversations with the police. They can ask them how they're doing, their plans, what's been going on, and make sure the police are doing what they're supposed to be doing. Police could get disciplinary action if they turn their cameras off when the observer switches to them and voice or camera is off. Also with all the footage streamed to central server locations, no one place could "delete the evidence"
How's that Mars One coming along? When can I get off this planet?
Like, the video was not dacted in the first place, so why re-dact it?
That is all...
Even the best cop will cover for other bad cops in one way or another. This makes all cops bad. You may think it is a gray area, but it is not. All cops are bad. Being human is their greatest weakness.
Just wait until a gang of black thugs beats you to a bloody pulp and rapes your girlfriend.
You'll be thinking differently about the cops then.
Duh, redact it by putting a black rectangle over the feed.
The real concern is that City and State Officials will be caught on-camera committing vice crimes, fraudulent acts and soliciting favors in exchange of cash and drugs and prostitutes.
Simple.
Yes, there's absolutely no way we can let cops do their own review and redactions. It has to be done by a neutral third party out of their influence.
We also need body cameras which don't really turn off when the cop thinks it has. And turns on at random intervals throughout the day.
All of these recordings are going to take up a lot of space. How about we re-purpose that gigantic new spook data center in Utah?
just go the area with poor cell coverage and then the video feed stops and the cops can't be at fault.
"Just wait until a gang of thugs beats you to a bloody pulp and rapes your girlfriend.
You'll be thinking differently about the cops then."
See how you can make this argument more effective by removing unnecessary racism?
That was one person.
By your justification, there would be no sympathy for any Germans today because several nutcases of their race fucked up.
That they can't change the law?
The ideal system would: 1) Have all data collected by the camera (or other sensor) stay encrypted, even from the officer. 2) Have all data collected move off the device and onto secured servers. 3) The device(s) have a visible identifier (light?) to indicate they are functioning properly. 4) If the device malfunctions, the officer becomes a civlian not a police officer. On a side note, how bout one the terms of service of being a publically elected official being a publically visible NSA scan on the official for their term of service.
I take it you've never been to Bed-Sty. Guess what, lots of the cops there are black too.
> Fucking blacks [...] I have no sympathy whatsoever for their plight.
Now I really know you've never spent any time in Bed-Sty, or even know any black people on a meaningful personal level.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for you or the people who upmodded you.
pro-tip: don't condemn and lump an entire community into one caricature, Timothy McJimBob.
Some factoids: FOIA law is different in each state. For example policein-car video is not subject to FOIA in California while video is subject to FOIA law in Washington state. When it comes to Washington State FOIA law, the definition of privacy is *very* limited. There no such thing as 'an overly broad' request in Washington state.
Washington state law provides for minimal recovery of cost savings incurred in servicing FOIA requests. Courts have enforced FOIA requests requiring whole town government to come to a complete halt while the staff service 'any-and-all' requests.
Now I really know you've never spent any time in Bed-Sty, or even know any black people on a meaningful personal level.
Why the fuck would a person who has better things to do want to spend time in
a shithole like Bedford Stuyvesant ? You are a special kind of idiot if you think you can
presume to judge ME when I have not lowered myself to visiting the sewer you inhabit.
The fact remains that blacks cause a disproportionate amount of trouble for society
in the United States. People are sick and tired of this shit. The fact that there are
some decent people who are black does NOT change the truth about the bad behavior
from the blacks in the US. If you want to be respected, you people need to control yourselves
better, and quit breeding irresponsibly just so you can get a welfare check.
We need to go past simple rules which can be changed at whim. We need to mandate encryption of all video and the decryption keys must be stored with a 3rd party who will only release an individual key in response to a court-issued warrant. Not just a court order that any court clerk can sign, but a full-blown judge-signed warrant. We also need official data-expiration policies such than anything older than a year is deleted unless there has been a petition to preserve it - and that's a mere petition to preserve, you'll still need a warrant to decrypt but preservation pending a warrant needs to be easy enough.
If we don't make access physically difficult (versus administratively difficult) it is inevitable that these videos will end up in databases the way license plate scans have. And ten years down the road when Moore's law has kicked up our computational power up by another 100x they'll be running facial recognition, voice recognition, engine-sound recognition, gait-recognition, etc on the videos and data-mining the F out of it so that it becomes a tool for oppression worse than no video at all.
There are a lot of valid reasons to make the video available to the police - better supervision, training (replay their own mistakes as well as study the mistakes of others), etc. But, everything in life is a trade-off and the price of those minor beneficial uses will be state abuse of the camera footage. The only way to preserve liberty is to design the system such that no one, no one at all, has unrestricted physical access to footage.
K my man!
Is irony still the shackles of youth?
I expect you will consent to doing your job under the same conditions? most people wouldn't.
When you say "gang of thugs" you ARE referring to the cops, right?
You mean in the real world there are conflicting priorities and complexities?
But this is Slashdot - I demand that the situation be simple and resolvable by unidirectional moral outrage!
Make it law at a federal level that if a case hinges on the presence or absence of video then the case automatically goes in the civilians favor (unless the video shows otherwise). And the video must be uncut and continuous (no taking a couple seconds out to "improve" the video).
Anyone who has worked retail has.
I won't talk to the police with video cameras. No redaction necessary. Lay on more stones!
I'm sure this is just a disguised attempt to allow them to corrupt video right at the parts when they start beating an unconscious person with batons.
All or nothing. None of this "redacting" bullshit. Or the redacting has to be done at the hardware level, not after the fact. This is just asking to be abused.
The world according to pay grade, clearance level, and adminstrative policy.
Does no one else see anything wrong with this picture?
Woe betide Caesar when he is finally rendered unto.
Wait until you knee-jerk politically correct pussies who modded my post down get mugged by a pack of
sweet nice black youths.
Your worldview will change, I promise you that.
Police Chief: "Videos are for evidence, not transparency"
After seven seperate FOIA requests, I was able to piece together contiguous video of a police officer brutalizing my autistic son. There was no legitimate reason for the redactions in the first place.
By the way - we were made whole through the legal process.
Anything that helps the cops shoot more black people should be pursued.
The important question is and always ought to be, are those whom the redaction laws are meant to protect going to feel safe otherwise? I suspect that the concern is not that a gang member will use a FOIA request to get the video clip, but that a news broadcaster will, will air it, and the gang member will see or hear of it.
The 'magically turn that face into an address' process is something known as 'facial recognition' and 'memory.' You do it every time you recognize somebody and remember where they live and/or frequent.
There's a reason laws against witness tampering and the like exist, you know. It's because people really will do this, and a lot of people believe--rightly or wrongly--that if all the witnesses are gone, the case will fall apart.
Privacy for me, but not for thee.