Video Analytics As Power Multiplier For Security Services
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As time passes, Video Analytics capabilities in investigations carried out by security services turn from a luxury to necessity. Citizens expect the government to keep up with the speed of technological developments and believe that today, at an age of digital video evidence, information can be processed much faster than before. But can citizens possibly understand the mass of digital video information that law enforcement services have to deal with?
During the course of investigating the Boston marathon bombing, the FBI, working closely with local law enforcement, elicited the public’s help. They were flooded with video and digital images from private citizens, television crews and businesses providing surveillance footage. The video and image collection was too diverse—and too plentiful—for agents to thoroughly process and evaluate in a short amount of time and yet it was video footage that helped investigators identify the suspects in the end.
Tragic incidents such as the marathon bombing represent a small fraction of the video challenges facing the criminal justice and public safety communities. Digital evidence is prevalent in a majority of casework at the federal, state and local levels. Surveillance, body cameras and video from custodial interviews are crucial for public safety. In fact, they allow identifying the same person in several different videos and cross-match identities. However, technology alone will not solve a crime, as human capital is still the most critical resource to facilitate a successful investigation. Automation merely creates an environment that helps facilitate eyes-on the most pertinent data and offers technology that supports the investigators’ expertise in exploiting actionable intelligence as quickly as possible.
No doubt many countries that choose to adopt this new technology will also require a new set of skills, special training for those active in the field and the development of new policies regarding it. We can only hope that these new capabilities will help deter criminals from acting.
