On December 9, POLICE's virtual technology webinar series, POLICE Technology Experience focused on "Video Analysis, Redaction, Surveillance, and Storage." The keynote and one of the case studies detailed how Veritone's AI-driven tools can make law enforcement agencies more efficient. (You can register and view this content at https://www.policetechnologyexchange.com/experience)
Jon Gacek, Veritone's head of government, legal, and compliance business, presented a keynote titled "How Public Safety Organizations are Actively Addressing the Changing Need for Transparency." He discussed both general issues about law enforcement transparency and how Veritone's tool can agencies meet these standards.
Veritone's transparency tools include Illuminate, Redact, and IDentify. Illuminate uses artificial intelligence to cull unstructured video and audio for key content needed by an agency; Redact uses AI models to make video and audio redaction much faster and much more accurate; and IDentify uses facial recognition and AI to let agencies quickly compare photos of individuals at crime scenes with their own and with other agencies' booking photos, as permitted.
Gacek said that Veritone's aiWare is so powerful that the San Francisco Giants baseball team is using it to search through decades of TV broadcast video and film to find key images of players making specific plays in front of specific backgrounds.
Gacek said that AI is critical for the future of law enforcement transparency. "Public request volume is growing," he said. And that is making agencies spend more money and dedicate more resources for operations like redaction. According to Gacek, it has been estimated that for every 75 body cameras used by an agency the agency has to hire one additional person to handle redaction. He added that he knew of one large American law enforcement agency that has a $25 million budget for redaction.
Following Gacek's keynote, Sgt. Jason Druckenmiller of the Oregon (OH) Police Department presented a case study on Veritone Redact and how it has helped his agency achieve greater transparency.
The Oregon (OH) PD—48 sworn—was one of the first agencies in its region to equip officers with body-worn cameras. Druckenmiller says the agency's chief, Michael J. Navarre, was very interested in making operations more transparent to the community. Which led to a discussion of how to redact the videos.
Druckenmiller was given the mission to find the best way to redact the videos so they could be released. He says he conducted a "bake off" between various redaction tools, including Veritone Redact. His method for evaluating the redaction tools was to work on a 10-minute video with each of them. He found that Veritone Redact could do the job in 25 minutes while the others required as much as one hour and 20 minutes.
Druckenmiller said key aspects of Veritone Redact that made it more efficient than the other tools he tested. One of the most important, according to Druckenmiller, is the audio transcript, which can be searched for words or numbers and will take the viewer to the specific scene where that word or number was used. Another key feature of Veritone Redact that Druckenmiller said made it more efficient than the other tools he tested was the User Defined Region (UDR) Tracking, which makes the automation more accurate.
Veritone Redact is a cloud-based product, so the user does not have to have special software or hardware. Users rent its capabilities by the hour or hours of video they want to redact. Druckenmiller said that was very attractive to his agency.