Thursday, October 4, 2012

Provocative idea

Every now and then, someone comes up with an idea that fundamentally alters things.  A so-called "game-changer".  I think that Commander James Schnabl, of the Santa Ana, CA Police Department may have done just that.

In an article published in the September edition of The Police Chief, Commander Schnabl asks the question,"Are Video Police Reports the Answer?"  He then lays out a paradigm shift, in which the police officer's written report is essentially replaced by real-time video recording of interviews with victims, witnesses, and suspects.  The written report becomes just a brief supplement to the meat-and-potatoes provided by the video.

Commander Schnabl essentially questions the status quo, in which police officers make observations and conduct interviews, distilling these into written reports describing the investigation. While recordings are made in some cases, they basically supplement the written case file.   Instead, in Schnabl's process, video provides direct evidence of what the officer saw, did, and what people said. The written report is merely a synopsis that supplements the video, rather than the other way around.

The development, improvement, availability, and proliferation of personal video recording equipment makes this rethinking of police reporting more plausible.  I have no doubt that body-worn recording, server-based retrieval, advancements in video technology, and improvements in archiving and storage will continue to impact police work. Schnabl's radical reinventing of police reporting may indeed be around the corner.

18 comments:

Steve said...

That sounds like a good idea to me. Actual recordings would certainly be more accurate and informative than an officer's memory or interpretation of what was said or done, especially in tense, fast-moving situations. My guess is that not all officers have a\]the knack for writing clear, concise, and accurate reports, even if they do have a good recollection of the events. My only question is whether there are legal technicalities that might prevent or limit the use of these techiques.

Anonymous said...

and yet when a person wants to do the same thing(to record the officer) they get treated differently or harrassed

Anonymous said...

Tom-As you know there is a lot of "non-verbal" communication that takes place in any interview. Whether it is fidgeting due to anxiety, breathing patterns, eye-contact or lack thereof, body movement, hand position, inflection and tone, none are captured on paper. But video doesn't lie.

256

Anonymous said...

Director,
I asked this on your "evaluating times" blog a few days ago. It might be a better fit on todays topic.
"It seems like almost everybody has a cell phone with both video and audio recording capability. Do you have a procedure in place that allows members of the General Public to send in videos of suspicious activity?

Gun Nut

Anonymous said...

Let's face it, wearable computers will be next. Then it's just one step more and cyborgs will come.

ARRRRG!!!! said...

Because of a provocative idea, I don't have to worry about if the wind is blowing or not. Thank you Mr. Johnson.

Steve said...

Arrrrg!!!!

You should have said, "Misters Johnson" since it was the Johnson brothers who started the company. Cameron Waterman is actually credited with the first gasoline powered outboard, but your quip is still quite funny.

Anonymous said...

Steve-Ole Evinrudstuen (Evinrude) is credited by some as being the inventor. I know someone that knew him as a child. He lived in the same Milwaukee neighborhood as Harley and Davidson and actually designed the first carburetor for H-D Motor Company.
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Herb said...

This idea has been around since 1984, or maybe 1949...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

Steve said...

With average citizens having the ability to both capture and publish videos of police or other government officials (think Rodney King or Romney's nanny cam event), you could almost say now that Little Brother is watching.

Anonymous said...

Citizen cameras are catching all kinds of footage these days. Not a smooth move; there goes a career. A cynic might suspect that the effective date of his termination might be dragged out and delayed long enough to let him collect a pension. The just-minded would hope he gets no pension at all. We'll see which way that plays out.

Tom Casady said...

Gun Nut,

Didn't mean to space you off, it's just been impossible for me to keep up with email, blog, and duties this week.

We really don't have very good capabilities for ingesting citizen-submitted photos and video right now. We can do it, it just isn't very elegent: send an email with an attachment, or a link to something like youtube or flikr.

The only actual application we presently maintain that is suitable for direct submission is TipSoft, the online tip software we use in conjuction with crimestoppers. We are getting an increasing number of images submitted there, mostly photos from a suspect's Facebook wall, courtesy of a tipster.

I attended two sessions this week on this very issue, which I have blogged a bit about in the past: the next generation of 911.communications.

Anonymous said...

I think it's a good idea, however, taking some reports from people and determining the elements of a crime can be difficult, especially the folks who are excited, angry, etc. Many people just ramble their whole life story and somewhere in the middle is their report. That's essentially what an officers report details now, the elements, the points that matter, and leave out most of the useless. Placing a audio/video recording of a "report" will take quite some time in many cases to figure out what's being reported by just listening or watching. So the officers report, or their report that supplements the recorded report will still be the most viewed and will still be necessary. I could see management personel, report reviewers, etc reading the officers report over watching a recording. How do you cut out the unusable, unclear, unreliable, false information? The parts where the reporting person wonders off topic etc.

I'm all for recording contacts on both sides, police recording interactions and public recording police, and it holds excellent information, it's just the logistics of it being a "report" when many parts of a conversation hold no value in many circumstances.

Tom Casady said...

12:19,

In many respects, this trend is already well underway, in my opinion. As Shnabls's article points out, there has been a huge proliferation of recording technology and devices. This has resulted in an explosion in the number of recorded statements and all kinds of audio/video recordings, even in cases that no one would have dreamed of recording a few years ago. There are also a growing number of States (including Nebraska) that are requiring by law that suspect interviews be recorded when practicable in certain high-grade felonies.

This trend is not without it's problems. First, Records Units (like LPD's) are deluged with recordings in need of transcription, many of which are filled with the artifacts of in-the-field recording--background noise, mumbling, indecipherable slang,, and so forth. These recordings are far different than what a court reporter would have to work with at a deposition. The quality and sheer volume is a real problem for transcriptionists. If you've never done it, it is hard to understand how tedious an hour long interview filled with "uh huh", "I donnos", and "huh uhs" can be for the person trying to turn it into an accurate and intelligible transcript.

A second problem, in my view, has been the demise of high quality, thorough but concise police reports that summarize the key highlights from recorded interviews. It is common today to see a case with a dozen statements, but only a couple of supplementary reports. This is just the reverse of what you used to have. It can take a lot of digging for a prosecutor to find a key piece of information that is buried in a 60 page statement, if it has not been highlighted in a summary report that distills the voluminous recordings down into a more manageable story of the investigation.

A third problem is that technology, no matter how good, doesn't always work. Hard drives fail, batteries die, microphones get disconnected, SD cards get reformatted. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, and it seems that this happens at the worst possible moment.

Still, there is nothing better than the direct evidence: exactly what the victims, witnesses, and suspects said. On balance, the proliferation of audio and video recording is a good thing.

Anonymous said...

LPD needs a system like LSO has where photos and recorded statements are put online instead of put on a CD or DVD and tagged into property. The Prosecutors would be able to see the evidence and reports and speed up the transcribing by Records.

Not to mention the cost savings of not using all of those CDs, DVDs and property reports.

Anonymous said...

I thought we were supposed to have an online evidence system like that in place years ago. What's the hold up?

Tom Casady said...

6:44,

Everything always seems easier than it actually turns out to be. Stand by.

Anonymous said...

I set up a tip blog, about stupid things people see around a certain unnamed town, I don't live there, but they send me plenty of photos right to my gmail account, could there be a public address such as citizenreport@gmail.com ? all cell phones can send to an e-mail and with it viewable in a browser you should be able to do what you want, this is easy, free it shouldn't take millions of dollars and a consultant to handle pictures and video that at its worst is still many times better than what was around in the past! get some college interns to build you a server if you are worried about security