Police Using youTube to Catch Criminals
The most interesting part of this article is about how antiquated and almost useless the images are since all of the companies invoulved, including Home Depot, use such low grade equipment. The best quote is: “The experience appears to demonstrate just how poor information sharing is between law enforcement in different localities. Why would the police in one town need to rely on an outside tool such as YouTube to discover that similar crimes were occuring in neighboring towns? A good centralized crime database and some search and analytic tools could have made quick work of matching up similar crimes. Instead the three police organizations only discovered that they were looking for the same men by happenstance.”
And if law enforcment is so slow to adopt technology as evidenced in this story, how much good are they ever going to be in deterring identity theft, denial of service attacks, company firewall intrusions and the like.
NOT!
YouTube police video: What’s wrong with this picture?
By Robert L. Mitchell on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 10:04am
On December 14th the Franklin, Mass. police department posted a surveillance video of a local crime on YouTube in hopes that someone will come forward and identify the perpetrators, according to a report this morning on New England Cable News Network. At first blush the posting of the Franklin Police Suspect Video seems innovative. “The more people that see it, the more likely somebody is going to recognize the people that they see and give me a call,” patrolman Brian Johnson said in the NECN story.
Then he went on to say that members of other, nearby police departments who watched the video realized that they are looking for the same suspect for similar crimes in their municipalities. “Once the video was out there I got calls from two other law enforcement agencies in this area, that after they looked at my video and compared it against active investigations they already had, we were able to match up that we were all looking for the same two guys,” he said.
What’s wrong with this picture? The experience appears to demonstrate just how poor information sharing is between law enforcement in different localities. Why would the police in one town need to rely on an outside tool such as YouTube to discover that similar crimes were occuring in neighboring towns? A good centralized crime database and some search and analytic tools could have made quick work of matching up similar crimes. Instead the three police organizations only discovered that they were looking for the same men by happenstance.
As for the store video itself, the picture quality is so poor that one questions why Home Depot, the victim in this case, used the technology in the first place. Had the security camera taken these images in high definition the probability that someone could positively identify the culprit would increase greatly. High-definition video equipment is still fairly expensive, but the extra cost could bring a big payback by increasing the chance of catching the culprits. Once word got out that police were able to use high definition security camera images to identify more criminals and make more arrests, crimes in areas where those cameras are in use might just decline.
