Extracting Zooming Shots from 600 Hrs of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage | Hacker News Reader

Extracting Zooming Shots from 600 Hrs of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage

lav.io

215 pointsjbegley116 comments

Quite a lot of pearl clutching going on in this article.

The overlay with street names and parcel numbers is life saving technology. Instead of reckless high speed car chases most agencies here in California now break off the chase and have a helicopter follow the individuals until they bail on foot, at which point the air unit can provide accurate guidance (with street names and house numbers) so they can be apprehended.

When the unit is overhead of a fixed incident like a traffic stop or an apprehension they zoom in to provide additional recorded evidence of the incident. Anyone who is a fan of police having body cams should be overjoyed at this additional level of situational observation that the air unit affords.

I don't see anything concerning about the videos. But, I do think they should be shared with the public by default. Maybe after a short delay to allow redaction of sensitive scenes (which would in turn need to be acknowledged and explained and subject to future FOIA-style requests).

Same for body-cams worn by beat officers.

And in both cases, missing video (including purposefully obscured by car hood, etc) should be grounds for discipline.

They are shared with the public by default. The video downlinks are not encrypted and with the appropriate equipment and knowledge you can watch them in real time. In a lot of places TV stations get the direct video feed under an agreement that they delay it by a few minutes to avoid helping suspects.

In terms of body cam footage, missing video or intentional obstruction are relatively rare occurrences - but it gets heavy media play. For the most part public defenders hate body cams because they dramatically increase work load [1] and make the defense of observable charges (DUI, resisting arrest, etc) very difficult.

1. https://www.pilotonline.com/government/local/vp-nw-body-came...

Where are you getting your info that missing body camera is a rare occurrence? I've done a non-trivial amount of analysis on body camera metadata against arrest timings in Chicago and this is... just plain wrong. It's an extremely common occurrence.

And no, this sort of video isn't shared with the public by default. Maybe for some, but it's NOT common.

I was referring to the air unit footage being public by default. Sorry for the confusion.

I applaud your efforts to dig into body cam footage for police accountability. But there is probably selection bias in that you're looking around already noteworthy incidents where there might be suspicious behavior. On the whole a staggeringly massive amount of camera footage is being generated to the point that storage is becoming a budget concern for some departments: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/some-us-police-depar...

You're absolutely making ugly assumptions from out of nothing by thinking I was looking at notable incidents. I was not. My only criteria was about whether there was an arrest, and whether there was body camera footage around that arrest. Granted, the reporting I did on it was for the early days of the George Floyd protests, but it's a pattern that persists. Hell, there's a god damned policy that says whenever a cop moves from one unit to another, that they don't bring their BWC with them. Chicago has entire units that aren't required to have body camera despite the fact that they do arrests in areas of reported high crime, and yes, those units have shot people without even wearing any BWC.

And of course BWC usage is an expensive undertaking. But how, in any way, does that even remotely come close to speaking to its actual, complete usage or whether it gets disabled or turned on prior to an arrest? That's a silly and naive statement, and I think you know it.

Here's the work I did on BWC: https://thetriibe.com/2020/12/hundreds-of-chicago-police-mad...

  New data released by the Chicago Police Department (CPD) from the first weekend of the Black Summer 2020 uprisings shows that 64% of all arrests between May 30 and June 1 occurred without body camera footage.

I can't read the page you linked because it is terribly broken with overlays, but from what I gather you are conflating "missing footage by policy" (specific units don't have cameras allocated to them) with "missing by malice" (officers intentionally subverting the system).

There is a bit of dogmatism in your argument. If you are convinced the police are evil to begin with, that is the only conclusion you are going to draw from the data you have.

Just to be clear, btw, the analysis I did was very intentionally done around cops who themselves had used BWC recently, mostly within 24. You can review the data, charts and methodologies here:

https://observablehq.com/d/9f09764dbbdfc4b5

Some of the descriptions are incomplete, but the charts address your point.

Also, you still haven't shown any information about why you believe the non-use of BWC is rare, so I'm going to assume you hold some deep biases that have prevented you from sharing those.

Lmao. No I'm not conflating those two. But hey, keep being lazy in your thinking and making assumptions from you know where.

Best.

> I applaud your efforts to dig into body cam footage for police accountability. But there is probably selection bias in that you're looking around already noteworthy incidents where there might be suspicious behavior.

"Footage only goes missing if that would help the police" is not really a compelling defense of the integrity of the system, even if that happens in less than 1% of cases. "We're here for you, except when you need us" makes an awful slogan.

> For the most part public defenders hate body cams

That's too strong of an assertion. The PDs I've heard from actually like body cameras because it keeps police honest.

The problem, as that article describes, is that PDs are overworked, underpaid, and offices of the public defender are usually understaffed. Reviewing bodycam footage for every arrest has substantially increased their already heavy workload.

A lot of the footage is definitely FOIA'able, but it's not a default and they will readily deny you for arbitrary reasons. Most common is because of "undue burden", for the time it takes to review/redact.

Last time I requested/received surveillance video of a protest, it took about 3-4 months to get through FOIA and they didn't even redact it.

> Instead of reckless high speed car chases most agencies here in California now break off the chase and have a helicopter follow the individuals until they bail on foot

High-speed car chases are definitely a thing of the past in metropolitan California, but in most cases once they break off that's the end of it. The bad guy gets away until they pop up somewhere else, hopefully not within easy reach of an escape car. The helicopter chase was always and remains a relatively exceptional case.

Why is that? Is it because of the expense of the flights themselves?

AFAIU, Because 1) strictly speaking car chases were much more frequent than one would believe based on television reporting. Most chases were short and didn't end up on the nightly news. Time, expense, and opportunity, as well as the benefits (catching some guy who, at least in theory, could be picked up later) are definite limitations. 2) How is the helicopter (10-15 minutes away or worse) supposed to find the car if they're not being followed and aren't driving conspicuously, especially at night? Relatedly, 3) the point of breaking off the chase is so the suspect stops driving dangerously themselves. Being chased by a helicopter, or even the expectation of being chased, potentially creates a similar situation the new policies are intended to avoid.

Note that the new policies are aimed at preventing chases and dangerous driving (or at least induced dangerous driving), not merely breaking away after a chase has begun. So, for example, in SF cops routinely break off the moment they believe the suspect knows they're being followed, whether or not the suspect is driving dangerously. And much to the dismay of citizens, it seems in many (most?) cases they don't even attempt to follow the car at all.

While bodycams are generally a good and necessary thing, a general pattern that's now widespread is officers selectively covering up and turning off their cameras or putting up their car hoods during stops to avoid accountability and create selective narratives. And those are things that are supposed to be directly connected to their person. A helicam has many more degrees of freedom, and much less observability.

This is easily addressed. any evidence coming from such an encounter gets tossed. Cop claims they got assaulted by someone and had their hood up or their body cam was malfunctioning or covered up? Gets thrown out and charges stemming from the stop itself are dismissed. Civilian died in that situation and there was a similar problem? All cops on the scene are mandatorily charged with manslaughter - no prosecutorial discretion is allowed and a federal prosecutor is appointed.

A fig leaf of cops acting like gangsters is surprisingly quite easy to remove.

In theory, yes. In practice, what legal resources does the average person have to bring a case? How do their political connections compare? Oh, they died, no one saw, here’s a voucher. Have you looked at the odds of a cop getting charged with manslaughter lately?

And that’s just some positive action. Good luck proving there was malintent behind a helicam strategically losing focus, youre proving a negative.

Any death that involves a cop should be investigate by federal prosecutors. There’s a lot of deaths at the hands of cops, but not enough that you can’t investigate them.

Ultimately, if you keep this up the deaths go down and there’s less to prosecute.

Somehow other countries are able to have police that don’t regularly murder the people they’re policing and whose body cams seem to be functioning correctly. A very small portion of cops are responsible for the bulk of issues but the political culture around police and police unions keeps a horrible status quo around.

Agreed - police should be compelled to ensure the same level of diligence with their body cams as I'm sure they do to ensuring their sidearm is loaded at the start of the shift.

Throwing away the evidence doesn’t help victims of police abuse though.

I'm surprised such actions aren't treated like spoliation, in which the court assumes the worst of evidence intentionally destroyed by a party.

Police departments in the US are so corrupt that most of their abuse never gets to a court room in the first place.

How common is this pattern? I've gone about this at length in my comment history, but I think people drastically overestimate how often that happens. It's rare enough that I've never seen it after looking into dozens of use of force events by my local PD. Not saying it never happens, but usually there's a good explanation for lacking body cam footage (like the officer was off duty or undercover). It's actually somewhat reassuring that a lot of the time you'll see cops reminding each other to turn their cameras on, or freaking out if it falls off during a scuffle and they can't find it.

It’s not pearl clutching. It is an affectation put on in order to emphasize the television police drama trope of high action, high impact digital surveillance.

This is in contrast to hours upon hours of footage of almost nothing happening at all.

Was going to say, those road overlays are common if you watch chase footage. ABC7 has a cool setup.

Quite a lot of pearl clutching going on in this comment.

Here's the quote about the street names:

> Second, I am struck by the design of the interface itself: the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on.

Struck. Doesn't sound like a value judgement to me. The only thing the author has an explicit problem with is the level of detail the camera captures. I see two sentences in reference to this. I wonder why you thought the first sentence was necessary (I'll leave the arguments that don't actually address anything in the article alone).

Did you not finish the article? Later:

> I kept returning in my mind to the question of the interface itself. To how the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface somehow became a reality.

> This slip between fiction and reality seems to speak more broadly to the role of law enforcement itself, and to how self-mythologizing police narratives go on to shape the world. To put it another way, the footage is a product of the fantasy that the role of the police is to protect us from ubiquitous hidden danger, a fantasy generated in no small part by the police themselves.

Any comment on anything is automatically considered criticism. It's a useful rule to keep in mind.

Note that this is not criticism, if anything I'm agreeing and expanding on what you said.

It is I, the pearl clutcher.

> pearl clutching

Says it all

> the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface [is] a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place.

Before proselytizing the dissolution of law enforcement, perhaps one ought to spend time researching the basics of sociology. Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation is probably a good place to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_as_a_Vocation

its so common that it actually has a term for it, copoganda. But on-the-point you are making why does it has to be this silly all or nothing choice with policing the police? why cant we have more oversight and actual negative outcomes for ill behaved cops without giving them full free reign to do whatever? or report on police narrative without any degree of pushback.

Citations podcast had a bunch of episodes on this discussing in details, here is couple: https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/live-interview-police-def... https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-54-the-casual-rac...

Why would anyone read that? It's a work of fiction. Weber, like everything else in early sociology, was writing page upon page of stuff that merely flowed out of his brain. To continue citing this stuff is to make a mockery of science.

Grew up in a mid size city that got rid of police department. Sherif calls would take 45 minutes to respond.

Place was a hell hole by the time we moved out.

Didn’t even move far. Just to city that had police. Was drastically better.

Definitely doesn't sound completely made up. Nope.

Just sounds like a rural town to me. Whole police departments have been disbanded due to funding, corruption, and public outcry. Services are (often poorly) handled by county or neighboring towns temporarily or even permanently.

Here’s a recent one in Alabama, same Sheriff situation as OP. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ggmn/vincent-alabama-polic...

> The city will now rely on a neighboring sheriff’s office in Shelby County to answer emergency calls.

Which city did you move from?

Suspecting Oklahoma.

For anyone who doesn't share OP's world view and might be interested in working on the latest, greatest stabilized imaging systems and augmented reality solutions to support hollywood, broadcast TV, (yes) cops, firefighting, animal conservation, methane leak detection and more, we are hiring computer vision, software, and electrical engineers; DM me and check out where this tech is now:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-wXCVfiNbGVBjJCx38xb46-D... https://shotover.com/products/m2

Anyone interested in disruptive technology, tech startups & entrepreneurship should definitely look into the story of Churchill Navigation. They went from a tiny company to practically defining the market, in an industry that is usually slow-moving; dealing with city, county, and state contracts for police aviation technology. Their tech innovation alone wasn't enough, it also took a strong focus on customers, like customer support that "doesn't scale". Tom Churchill quotes Alan Kay, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”: They acquired an aerial camera company so they can achieve Apple-style hardware/software integration, and innovate without being limited by what traditional hardware manufacturers are capable of. He's stated that their largest growth area right now is AI.

Twitter thread with some more info: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1570452343233318912

Hello, it's me, the pearl-clutching, not sane, proselytizing, pseudo-intellectual author of this blog post. Happy to field your many insults/inquiries!

> and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place.

What do you think should take the place of the police force?

Genuine question, no judgement. I’m from a country that doesn’t have such a divisive and militarised police force so find it hard to understand this point of view.

I'm not sure how useful the overlay data is for live analysis but I'm glad it's overlaid on the video as a record of state. For instance the latitude and longitude are of no use to anyone who knows what this is a video of, but it stops video being misrepresented as of another location.

Style wise, I think it might actually be beneficial to emulate sci-fi films to an extent. It depends on the film of course, but the designers of those user interfaces are actual designers with a cohesive idea of what they want to represent. The alternative can often be a programmer who has to conjure the opinions of a committee into a user interface without the input of a design specialist.

Can you extract the overlay data to give a geographical way to search the footage?

You can now add "bitter and defensive" to that list

You could have just said artist.

Lots of pseudo-intellectual text mixed in with the pictures. There may certainly be reasons this technology is concerning, but the constant blaming and projection is not informative. It certainly doesn't move the conversation forward.

>It's a fakery to make the police feel…

A lot of comments have criticized this take.

It was a bad take, but there is a much more interesting direction in which to take this.

First, in a sense it IS fakery, and it IS making the police feel. Just not quite how the author said.

It's making them feel tantalized, like they have almost what they want, almost the good tech that they are dreaming of, and they are toying with it as they imagine what else they could do here in this UI if only the tech was better. The cameras of a decade from now (a decade in the future), the AI of a decade from now, the software of a decade from now, the networking bandwidth of a decade from now, etc… Hand on the control zooming imagining what else is almost in their grasp, soon, soon.

Anyone who has worked in tech has seen how things go from rough skeletons, to competent prototypes, to smooth products, to wicked assemblages of devastatingly effective tools and capabilities, over time.

We should not dismiss the fuzzy zooming mess as uninteresting or mere self-justifying fantasizing on the part of government employees; it portends much more than we can see right now of what they want from such a system.

That's quite the final conclusion to be drawing based on the aimless wanderings of a fidgeting police helicopter camera operator.

Perhaps declaring that the algorithmically condensed footage of a police helicopter camera equates to a supposed general mindset of the law enforcement profession in general might be just a bit reductive.

The videos are interesting. It’s a really cool interface. But the commentary seems from left field:

> It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place

I don’t like cops. But to say their existence isn’t needed is not sane.

The author also seems blind to the fact aerial photography has been a well established concept for well over 80 years at this point. These companies are not optimizing their optical systems to spy on people, but rather provide a good focus at long focal ranges in hardened systems, has nothing to do with police or their motives, its a general product feature.

This is interesting. The zooming in though, the script seemed to cut it when it’s not zooming. When I’m zooming in from wide area imagery, I usually zoom quickly to the general area then pan to the thing of interest that caused me to zoom.

Is the takeaway from that part really that they’re zooming in on nothing?

I didn't last a minute before getting dizzy, but I'm a bit more curious to see the few seconds after the zoom.

I think the script may just be grabbing the time when it's actively zooming and not the time while it's zoomed in. A lot of the time it does look like they're just idly zooming in though.

There's enough overlap in your domains that an editor might make assumptions about camerawork.

I don't get what is so sci-fi about that UI, it looks pretty utilitarian to me. Like barely a step up from what the military uses. Has the author never encountered a HUD before?1

The author doesn't realize the interfaces from movies are often just polished up and simplified imitations of real interfaces.

The ones in that video don't look particularly advanced to me either. Wait until the author sees high resolution MWIR imaging that can see through smoke and fog.

Wow! I hadn't heard about this leak and used to live in downtown Dallas so when I saw the first few street names I thought "huh, Commerce, Griffin, and Main must be pretty common street names."

That "sci-fi overlay of street names" is really cool tech.

It's also the only obvious answer for how to provide location information. Should street names be somewhere not overlaid near the street itself?

Don't know about Griffin, but Commerce and Main are pretty common in downtown cities. Commerce and Main is an intersection in downtown Houston.

I was genuinely impressed. Like, it makes sense that it exists given everything else we have now, but it has been a while since I saw a piece of software that works so well against real time video. All of a sudden, all that talk about augmented reality does not seem so far fetched.

It's actually not too difficult. The camera turret has incredibly precise GPS and knows exactly what angle it's at. With that, it's pretty straightforward to figure out where it's pointing at on the ground, grab the relevant map data, and overlay graphics.

I wouldn't call it "straightforward" but it is definitely computable. I worked on such a cartography-video overlay system about 10+ years ago, and you need at a minimum: precise GPS (as you pointed out), distance offset between GPS antenna and camera gimbal, precise aircraft attitude in all three axes, precise gimbal attitude, and a very good terrain model giving you altitudes of the land around the camera target. You also need to project your location, camera vector, and field of view polygon into a coordinate system that takes into account the curvature of the earth, because these aircraft are often many km from their targets. Very interesting project.

Ahh, thank you! I was super curious how that was done.

If the article writer is concerned about some helicopter footage, he would have an aneurysm over this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA

AFAIK this was done with commercially mass produced silicon, and it was 10+ years ago. Nowadays they can probably do 10x+ better.

Yea, the overlays are the least-worst thing there. Imagine what they do with the 2TB of videos (or more) that they are storing! They could run all kinds of analytics on that data, with time/location tracking included in there. Someday, you won't even have to pan + zoom a camera turret and will just digitally pan + zoom, because there will be cameras covering everything below the helicopter in great detail at all times. Imagine doing facial rec on it all, knowing where anyone was that was within ~500 meters of any police helicopter. Now, imagine you remove the requirement that the helicopter has a pilot, just run drones all over the place with charging terminals.

Instead of planes, why not used a tethered balloon with a 360 camera, and direct fiberoptic cable to the ground. Curious how high a balloon like this could go up before it exceeded the weight and strength limits of the filament line.

Looks like your answer is about 3,000 feet. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-deploy-...

Okay great thanks, so a consumer 1200mm lens can zoom upto 8 miles. But I guess under 45 degree angle, you would only get about 4500 feet horizontal range

Even ten years ago there were much much higher quality versions of this same concept: https://youtu.be/QGxNyaXfJsA

I bet a lot of the zooms that didn't seem to go anywhere were because the camera operator thought they saw something and needed to check it out, but it turned out to be nothing. If you're looking for a fleeing suspect that kind of thing will happen a lot.

I don't get his complaint about the interface. How would he prefer it look? Obviously the street overlay is super awesome and useful...

I'm curious how the real time overlay works. It's probably somewhat useful for certain aspects of situational awareness, but I'm not convinced that it's that useful in reality. "keep going down abc street and turn left at the 1000 block" really isn't that good of a way of giving directions over a radio unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are.

In any case I remember recently overhearing police activity where my local (US) police were trying to catch someone with a helicopter. They had FLIR and all sorts of goodies and they somehow managed to lose the guy. The prevailing theory of these cops was that the guy had just called an uber to get away.

Mh. It looks very useful to me. The helicopter is not responsible for guiding a squad car to the single square meter something is happening, they just need to get the squad car into visual range. Making calls like "Suspect turning left into foo street" is massively simplified with this overlay.

> unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are.

I mean, I don't exactly hold cops in high regard, but they do drive around in the city all day so I'd expect they have some sense of geography.

Wouldn’t it be relatively straightforward to link this helicopter thing to another app on the side of the ground officer? The camera knows the point on the map wherever the crosshairs is, just ping a GPS point from the camera interface and transmit the lat/lon to the ground unit’s GPS.

> "keep going down abc street and turn left at the 1000 block" really isn't that good of a way of giving directions over a radio unless the people on the other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are.

That does not sound that hard if you know how the area is laid out. Especially for people who drive around a lot, like cops, delivery drivers, taxis…

If you told me a street and a block number in my city I would know where to go in probably a second or two.

I'm assuming the overlay works by GPS location of the copter, and camera feedback to say what direction it's pointed and the zoom level. Combine that with a topo map of the area and OpenStreetMaps, and it's straightfoward to map the camera output image to what part of the ground that represents, and generate the overlays.

Yeah I would imagine it is all done in-camera. The camera has a GPS unit and IMU. It knows its zoom level and where it is pointing. The rest is easy.

> the rest is easy

...said the physicist ;-) https://xkcd.com/793/

> I'm not convinced that it's that useful in reality.

Tons of similar technology is designed to simply look fancy and movie-like and the whole point is to justify hefty price tags.

It's useful at pocketing tax money and keeping the surveillance and military-industrial business afloat.

Unsurprisingly 99% of comments in this thread are missing the point...

> other side have an inhumanly good sense of where they are

Police (and firefighters) know their streets really, really well.

I assume the police have a GPS in their car, as well as likely know the area (especially since high crime areas are often excessively patrolled, for better or worse).

Important parts from the article:

"In the footage, a police helicopter closely follows a pro-Palestinian protest as it snakes its way across Dallas.

Two things are immediately striking to me about the footage. First, I am amazed and disturbed by the level of detail that the camera is able to capture, by the proximity it achieves. The police helicopters are not merely tracking groups of people, they are nearly able to identify individual faces. Second, I am struck by the design of the interface itself: the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on."

> I kept returning in my mind to the question of the interface itself. To how the fictional, fantastical cop-movie interface somehow became a reality.

> This slip between fiction and reality seems to speak more broadly to the role of law enforcement itself, and to how self-mythologizing police narratives go on to shape the world.

Maybe "fiction" isn't the right word, but _every_ new product (or feature) is a "fantasy" before it gets actually built. If people first saw AR overlaying contextual info on top of video in film, I'm guessing that's because it took some further innovations to be able to do it in real time, and reliably, whereas doing it as an effect in post production can be slow and human-adjusted.

This isn't to say that cops _don't_ help perpetuate the perception that they're critical to society in exactly their current form, but this is weak evidence.

I think a more interesting perspective would be (a) how much is spent on police helicopters and (b) how often do they actually yield a result which wouldn't have been achieved otherwise? I wonder if a lot of it is just institutional bloat. "We hired the pilots, and we have the helicopters, and mechanics and fueling infra. If we don't fly them constantly, it will look like a waste, and the program might get a reduced budget next year."

Finding the spots where they zoom out might be interesting. I saw footage from 2020 where the helicopter camera was watching a group of police as they walked down the street to confront protesters on another block, and one of the officers randomly breaks a car’s window with his baton. The police helicopter camera operator quickly zoomed out and looked somewhere else. Amazing what cops will do when they don’t think anyone is watching.

> the sci-fi overlay of street names, borders, parcel numbers, target distances, and so on

What's the difference between "sci-fi" and "high tech"? (ignoring the obvious answer that if it's real it's literally not "science FICTION") Seems to me like "sci-fi" is more of a boogeyman term. Many of the apps on consumer grade phones seem similarly advanced.

> "the footage is a product of the fantasy that the role of the police..."

I am frequently skeptical of the police as well, but only 600 hours that's mainly one moderately sized city in the US suggests the footage is more a product of the leakers. I assume the footage is highly correlated, such in a give date range or in a categorized archive.

There are over 2000 police helicopters in the US; 600 hours is less than a day's worth, taken as a portion of the aggregate. We need accountability in policing, but drawing conclusions from such a small dataset is intellectually dishonest, and is literally tapping into the same logic of extrapolation that "bad cops" use.

> So I wrote a script that analyzed all 600 hours of footage, and automatically re-cut it to only include shots where the camera zooms in [...] now clocks in at one nauseating hour

Maybe including a few seconds after the zoom-in would have made it easier to see what they were zooming in on, and also made it less nauseating (albeit longer)?

Fun fact: The U.S. government saw the movie Enemy of the State and said, "We want that." And that's how we got programs like GORGON STARE and CONSTANT HAWK, which can track the movement of vehicles over a miles-wide area. Now it seems that municipal-level LE can get their hands on even more advanced versions of this tech.

The thing about Enemy of the State (1998) is, that 90+% of the stuff in it was doable with 1998 technology.

[citation needed]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5

> "It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place."

I'm sorry what?

I'm not a police cheerleader but does this guy ever tried to live in a populous place without police?

The word "police" seems to mean something different in America than in many other places, so I'm not surprised at american police abolitionism.

I have lived in places without police, or functionally without police, in the USA and elsewhere, and it seems totally uncorrelated with how safe I felt or, according to statistics, actually was. Far more strongly correlated (one way or the other) was local average material conditions and wealth disparity. Some of the places were quite populous, btw, at least in terms of density. And if we allow that the word "police" means something very different in the USA and other countries, I've lived in cities with populations greater than 2 million without police (the cops in taipei often aren't armed and their most common duty is to take statements in petty personal disputes, and we have some of the lowest crime rates in the world here).

If the USA wants to respond to bad material conditions and high wealth disparity by spending money on cops that from over here seem to do nothing or make things worse (I just saw a video where a cop in the USA arrested an old lady for giving food to people), I guess that's their prerogative, but from where I sit the people saying "why are we spending money on this" make more sense. I guess you believe it will get worse when they aren't there to issue speeding tickets, harass the homeless, and laugh at you when you report a stolen bicycle?

I'm ok with police surveillance of public areas. The main difference between a police officer on foot doing the same is that you don't notice you are being watched and that the camera can travel over more distance more quickly. I'm assuming they delete much of the information they collect eventually. And I mean information, as in names from face recognition or license plates read etc, not necessarily the raw footage which may contain faces and license plates but in a relatively unusable form.

Biggest problem there is that it's a waste of money much of the time.

All of these surveillance tools only work if you have docile population. If you're literally not willing to shoot people the way they do in Iran, the elite powerful minority is not going to suppress a population that is rebelling. The police could not control even small riots in the US once they broke out. The protesters did as they wanted. The strategy for now seems to be suppress, de-platform and de-bank people that are an emerging existential threat to the current power structure. The question is how long will this work.

> It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place.

Yow. What a high quality article.

My main thought on reading this is -- why do they need a whole helicopter to take that video? Shouldn't it just be a drone at a small fraction of the size and expense?

It's likely a combination of loiter time, capabilities, safety and availability. First you need something that can stay up for a long time so you either need a fleet of medium size devices or a larger device. Then there's the type; a plane type drone can't maneuver and tightly circle an area in a crowded downtown so to keep eyes on something you want a helicopter. Then however you run into issues operating that inside a city remotely, relying on GPS and you might have control interruptions so it needs to be able to safely navigate independently or at the very least stop and hover all on it's own.

It's a pretty tight set of requirements that might not have anything that fully ticks all the boxes yet as easily or fully as a human piloted helicopter. It's partially also familiarity and existing infrastructure. Most large cities have had some form of police helicopter service for a while so there's already support infrastructure and helicopters bought that won't all convert over to autonomous/remote operation and for those that don't it's much easier to follow an existing pattern than it is to pioneer something.

Does anyone have more details on the footage format itself? What is the codec used, bitrate? Is it all in one huge file or split. Are there perhaps full resolution stills available? (without the youtube compression) I'm interested in getting my hands on it to play with some ML models, but downloading 2TB will take ages on my connection. So knowing the details in advance would be helpful.

"It’s a fakery to help the police feel OK about themselves, and more importantly to coerce us into accepting the need for their existence in the first place."

Every bit of information helps. What's the hate for? This tech is cool and improving every day.

Wow, police helicopters have high-definition, gyro-stabilized cameras that can zoom in far enough to see people's faces? If only we could get that tech in private industry, then we could start the field of aerial cinematography.

You can. Contact Hasselblad Aerial Division.

I'm surprised the UI does not provide any feedback about the current zoom level. I guess the camera operator is constantly aware of where they are along the zoom out ... zoom in axis.

It actually does, there's a number on the top-right, right of Auto. Goes from 9[1] to 154, and then 154 2.0x zoom which seems like a digital zoom at that stage[2].

1: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=73

2: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=339

How did the author do the actual zoom detection? (or rather, what is any method that can work for automating this?)

I'm sure it's not rocket science, but I don't know how to do this offhand.

there's a link at the bottom to the code (https://github.com/antiboredom/camera-motion-detector/). I use optical flow and then just count the percentage of pixels that appear to be moving away from the center. If that's bigger than ARBITRARY_THRESHOLD it's a zoom-in.

This was the only thing I was curious about, since the article was just leaping to conclusions and speculation.

The "sci fi" reference reminded me of a book which a designer had on his shelf. Now I want to read it:

"Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction"

Ridiculous article. It’s very simple. If you don’t steal cars or try to elude police or break the law in some other way you have nothing to worry about.

Enhance!

I'll save you 3 minutes of reading:

"I took helicopter footage, which I didn't realize would have overlay data. There was nothing interesting in the footage. It reminded me of sci-fi movies. We don't need police."

Also, the visual overlay of street names and buildings is obviously extremely helpful for communicating context. The author tries to dismiss it as unnecessary sci-fi role playing, but it’s clearly a great solution to the problem of overlaying ground-level context that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious from the air.

That sums it up. no real learnings.

Spot on

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