By QueTel
This article is provided by QueTel.com and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Police1.
The ground swell of enthusiasm for outfitting law enforcement officers with body worn cameras (BWCs) has led to a new need, video redaction, as a tool for balancing public disclosure and privacy. Local law makers expect videos as a means to improve police behavior when interacting with the public and to reveal misbehavior. Side stepping the issue of whether the videos are public record, those jurisdictions that permit public disclosure must protect personal privacy, avoid revealing criminal justice information, and respect standards of decency. Thus redaction.
Despite the fantasy of automated redaction, the blurring and audio deletion process is time consuming and requires human judgement. It must capture targets within a continually shifting camera window and the dynamic nature of situations in which officers are involved much less getting clarity on what should be blurred.
While attention focuses on the process of masking subject matter to be blurred or deleted (audio), the total time to complete an effective redaction is much longer. Several steps that enter into the time it takes:
1) Preview and familiarization—Each redactor will need to play through a video, in order to get an idea of what needs to be done. This will reduce the number of “fits and starts” that s/he needs later on.
2) Sometimes conversion or transcoding—The redactor may need to convert the video from its original format to one that will work with the software s/he employs.
3) Identifying and marking targets to be blurred—The focus of the technology that is the subject of this RFI seems to concentrate on reducing the time required to spot targets and define them with an oval, rectangle, or other shape, as the move. The user also needs to remove any sensitive (criminal justice) information from the audio track. To the extent possible these are the areas where technology can make a significant impact.
4) Exporting or rendering the video—While we have not seen how each vendor translates the marking of subjects into unalterable blurred targets in each frame, we believe they all employ some sort of time-consuming “processing” routine to produce the redacted product.
5) Quality control—This step, known in the forensic world as “peer review” has a supervisor or other redactor confirm that the video and audio tracks meet the guidelines and interpretations used by the agency.
6) Signoff—When the video is ready for release, someone has to approve it and take responsibility that the video is ok to release (disclose). S/he is the one accountable for the protection of personal privacy and suppression of inappropriate content.
When accounting for the time needed to redact jurisdictions need to account for each of these steps.