Grant funding for video equipment

PoliceGrantsHelp.com provides great grant information. You can find out about all the grants below by creating a free account at their site.

Here are are direct links to grant summaries at their site:

·         New York State's Highway Safety Grant – deadline 5/15/13

·         Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant - North Dakota – deadline 5/17/13

·         Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program - Arkansas – deadline 5/17/13

·         COPS Community Policing Development – deadline 5/24/13

·         COPS Micro-Grant Initiative – deadline 5/24/13

·         Indiana Homeland Security Foundation Grant Program – deadline 5/31/13

·         Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) - Kansas – deadline 6/3/13

·         Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant – Maryland – deadline 6/12/13

Image-matching technology helps fight crime

Verizon is automatically checking their cloud for images and videos for the child pornography.

William Albaugh found this out the hard way when he backed up his home computer to Verizon's online backup service. The 67-year-old deacon of a Catholic church in Baltimore County didn’t realize he was giving away his secret—after he allegedly uploaded pornographic images and videos of children to his Online Backup and Sharing cloud account, they were scanned by a Verizon partner using technology that can automatically check images and videos for the presence of children known to be the victims of pornographers.

Full story at ars technica.

Storing in-car video evidence: cloud or local servers?

Officer.com posted a short article on some of the trade-offs of storing video evidence in the cloud versus local servers. Here's a bit from the article:

Should you store video evidence on the Cloud or Local Servers? This was a popular topic at IACP in 2012. Both have advantages, and both methods have their challenges. How an agency chooses to store their video is a critical part of this discussion, as it will always be intrinsically connected to how they record their video and the resulting file sizes.

Full article at Officer.com

Questions in the interview room

When something’s a big deal, it’s natural to talk about it. Like the handling of evidence, or making what you get from witnesses or suspects stick. So why is it that something that combines all of these elements and commonly becomes the centerpiece of a case is problem prone?

We’re talking about interview room recording. But the real question is: Why isn’t hardly anyone else?

Why verify?

The importance of verifying digital video evidence before leaving the scene.

The characters and crimes in this story are fictitious, but the DVR is real.  Everything the DVR does is real, as are all the photos. 

March 17, 1840 hours: A criminal robs a convenience store.

March 17, 1930 hours: Detective Murphy arrives on scene. He learns the perpetrator was armed with just a stick, but still took away a good amount of cash.