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| Toronto Catalogs Video Trove |
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March 6, 2010
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John Sandeman, manager of the TPS' Video Services Unit
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The Toronto Police Service (TPS)
receives about 54,000 videos a
year. Some are recorded by the
department's camera-equipped
interview rooms and patrol cars.
Others come from outside agencies,
private security surveillance
systems or the public.
by James Careless
All of these disparate videos
have something in common:
They must be ingested, cataloged,
stored and made accessible
to officers and court officers
for evidence gathering and trials.
One last thing: These videos must
also be kept demonstrably free of
tampering or editing. Otherwise,
they are worthless as evidence.
In recent years, the TPS recorded all of its videos
manually onto DVDs, and then had to store and track
them through all stages of their existence. Not surprisingly,
it took a lot of time and effort to keep this
system going, and all the humans interacting with it
left room for errors to occur. This is why the TPS
recently moved its videos onto MediaSolv's Integrated
Digital Evidence Management (iDEM) platform. Using
iDEM, the TPS has been able to create an interlocking
digital video recording, ingest, storage and retrieval
system that monitors every aspect of the video's history-
including who has seen it and when.
"Our technology offers investigators more autonomy
and ownership over their cases," said Jim
Weaver, President/CEO of MediaSolv Solutions.
"Officers can now rapidly produce, find, watch and
share the videos throughout the investigation and
trial phases. That alone significantly speeds up the
whole procedure and saves taxpayers' money."
"In Toronto, we have created an infrastructure
that is controlled by the 'Video Evidence
Touchscreen System'; VETS for
short," says John Sandeman,
manager of the TPS' Video
Services Unit. "Whenever an
officer prepares to interview
someone on camera, they
touch the VETS monitor to set
up the recording." As they
enter their name and badge number, VETS automatically
pulls their personnel information from the TPS'
human resources database and attaches it to the
video file's metadata. Then when the officer adds
the relevant case file number to the video file, VETS
accesses the TPS' Criminal Information Processing
Systems (CIPS) and attaches all of the case data.
If the person to be interviewed is in custody,
adding them to the video file takes a few touches on
the VETS screen.
After the recording is done, the video file is
stored on the TPS database, where it can be
accessed across the network by authorized investigators,
viewed by senior officers on demand and
burned to DVD for use in court. Since the VETS system
is fully tied into the rest of the TPS' databases,
such DVDs can have case files and other non-video
information loaded onto them as well.
"We are just in the process of rolling out VETS
across the department," Sandeman says. "To
date, the TPS units that have it now are reporting
real improvements in their
video handling. That's good
news, because as more agencies
add video surveillance to
their systems and we get
access to that video, VETS
reduces the time required to
manage it properly."
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