Vancouver's police department needs help from American forensic experts because they got a little too much help from citizens.

In the wake of the Stanley Cup Riots that broke out in the city earlier this year, the police asked people to send in their photos and videos of the mayhem (like the embed above). Many, many of them did. In total, 1,600 hours of footage was sent to local officials.

For the Vancouver PD, this deluge of data presented a terrible problem. In a recent press conference, Chief Constable Jim Chu admitted that it would take "two years" for his 50-person investigative team to process all that video. Two years (!) to analyze an incident that lasted just a few hours! Think about that. This is the surveillance society police problem: too much data, not too little.

So, Chu's team is looking outside Canada for some help. The Law Enforcement and Video Services Association maintains a video forensics training facility at the University of Indianapolis, which its creators had always imagined might be used in times of a national emergency to do large-scale footage analysis. The Vancouver riot footage will be the first time the Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab is put into emergency operation.