Since the summer of 2016 QueTel’s Redaction Center has redacted over 15,000 minutes of body worn camera video footage. This has helped avoid diverting thousands of hours of time of highly paid law enforcement professionals, part time college kids, or out of work film editors. Since the summer of 2016, the staff of the Center has redacted over 560 videos.
QueTel’s staff have helped fill in the increasing public pressure for transparency of police interactions with the public, by undertaking the still labor-intensive work of removing sensitive material from body worn camera videos. Vendor claims that automated redaction can solve the need to redact videos prior to public disclosure are no more possible, than fully automating latent print comparison. A human is needed.
Software can identify and follow a human face as it moves in the camera frame, but it cannot recognize a partial face, as it turns full face, or it first appears in the camera frame from one side or another. Software cannot distinguish a juvenile from an adult. Nor, can it distinguish criminally sensitive information (CSI) from the dialog stream in an audio track.
That’s where the Redaction Center’s professional staff come in. They use QueTel software on specialized computers to adhere to generic guidelines, and specific instructions from an agency blurring sensitive contents such as faces, cruiser MDT screens, and street addresses and, then, removing CSI from the audio track. Every precaution is taken to meet CJIS standards. All redactors pass background checks and operate in a windowless room, where they leave their cell phones outside while redacting files that have been, as long as 200 minutes, but average about 25 minutes.
Agencies upload to QueTel’s secure Amazon Web Services cloud or provide secure access to the agency’s stored files. When redacted the files are returned to the client’s cloud storage or posted on QueTel’s cloud for secure review. If the redactors have missed something the agency indicates the error and it is corrected, so that it has agency approval, prior to release.
Established in 1982, QueTel has built upon its 30 years’ experience serving law enforcement with systems that eliminate paper in the management of evidence including digital evidence from the street through forensic analysis to the court room and, thence, disposition.