Seattle Police Department looking for ‘a few good hackers’ to help it doctor dashboard cam foota

www.rawstory.com...

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) hosted a contest last week in which it invited hackers to compete to see who could redact dashboard and body camera footage most efficiently.

According to the official site for the SPD’s first-ever “HACKATHON,” the goal is “looking for a better, faster way to redact [the 1,612,554] videos and make them accessible as public records.”

Over the past five years, the SPD claims, it has recorded over 314,636 hours of dashboard footage of 911 responses, but cannot allow the public to access it because of privacy concerns about victims and witnesses.

Privacy my ass! If Law enforcement wants to win back the taxpaying citizens trust and support; this is not the way to do it. But if
Law enforcement would become more transparent with their actions, no blue code, citizen review boards, no preferential treatment when accused of criminal misdeeds instead of paid leave. That's a start...

If an ordinary citizen "hacked" evidence; they would be charged with obstruction of justice and prosecuted. See the disconnect?

Any "hacked" evidence by anyone should be inadmissible in a court of law.

What I see this action as, is the start of a trend to disavow citizen video on the grounds of "privacy"...

Not only would "altering" and "editing" be a concern,

What about some videos being made ahead of time to show a desired result?

You know, just "in case".

Always good to have "stock footage" available when needed.

I wonder why Seattle of all places would be spearheading a project.

a reply to: olaru12

They want to crop out footage before releasing it. How seamless are they requesting that be done?

Isnt that the place where the cop shoots a harmless woodcarver for no reason????Maybe they have other stuff to redact too......

a reply to: xuenchen

What about some videos being made ahead of time to show a desired result?

Thats too obvious. They showed us two angles at the gas station. The two that reveal nothing conclusive.

And only those two. But theres a strike three… the "missing" dash cam footage.

It would plainly show what was in his hand if he was standing right in front of the cruiser. (?)

Guess why they want to "hack" stuff like that?

I would get blurring faces and changing voices, but what else would they need to redact?

Also what is your expectation of privacy when dealing with the police?

They would also want to blur out street names, door numbers,car license plates as well as faces.

There are visual effects companies that deal with airbrushing out camera booms, microphones, tow ropes and any other visual artifact. Google did use software to blur car license plates, peoples faces but that tends to blur out adverts and telephone numbers as well.

a reply to: olaru12

What I see this action as, is the start of a trend to disavow citizen video on the grounds of "privacy"...

No, any judge can admit it as evidence.

A question I would like answered is what is the 'releaseability' of all the footage? For what purpose? Under what authority?

For those wanting to weed through all the footage and find all the times the cops screwed up (I agree it exists) and prosecute them, you need to be willing to accept retroactive citizen prosecution for all the times cops let folks go with a warning when they should have been ticketed and/or arrested. It goes both ways.

a reply to: Sremmos80

Thats pretty much all they're doing..

We’re looking for a few good hackers who can help automate the process of:

Blurring or redacting faces, license plates and audio in recordings, while leaving officers un-obscured

Transcribing, subtitling and time-stamping audio from videos

We’ve uploaded a sample video (broken into three .zip files) and we’ll post additional clips next week. Before you get coding, please note that any redaction software you dream up must leave recordings in their original format:

spdblotter.seattle.gov...

I guess I can see why the chicken littles would be scared of this, but this has been happening since security cameras and footage from them gets released to the public.