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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> "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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
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 atall.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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."
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.
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].
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.
"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.
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.
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.
"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."
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadThat "sci-fi overlay of street names" is really cool tech.
Is the takeaway from that part really that they’re zooming in on nothing?
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.
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.
...said the physicist ;-) https://xkcd.com/793/
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.
Police (and firefighters) know their streets really, really well.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
A fig leaf of cops acting like gangsters is surprisingly quite easy to remove.
And that’s just some positive action. Good luck proving there was malintent behind a helicam strategically losing focus, youre proving a negative.
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.
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.
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...
And no, this sort of video isn't shared with the public by default. Maybe for some, but it's NOT common.
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...
"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.
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...
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.
Best.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Says it all
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).
Note that this is not criticism, if anything I'm agreeing and expanding on what you said.
> 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.
This is in contrast to hours upon hours of footage of almost nothing happening at all.
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.
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.
Yow. What a high quality article.
AFAIK this was done with commercially mass produced silicon, and it was 10+ years ago. Nowadays they can probably do 10x+ better.
I'm sure it's not rocket science, but I don't know how to do this offhand.
> 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."
"Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction"
1: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=73
2: https://youtu.be/uXK5mx8NBf4?t=339
"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."
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.
"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."