Police video redaction: Where big data meets privacy

After several highly publicized cases of videos showing questionable police action, local departments increasingly are turning to body-worn cameras. Yet these systems, intended to capture exchanges between officers and suspects or victims, are causing new headaches for police officials as requests for the footage are being made through the states’ freedom of information laws.

Responding to such requests takes time and money because someone must sift through the video and make the appropriate redactions -- such as blacking out or blurring minors’ faces or sensitive information. Plus, redaction requirements vary according to each state’s laws. Besides the cost of the labor, police departments also must budget for video storage and redaction technology.

To offset the costs, some police departments have tried charging requestors. The New York City Police Department recently billed cable news channel NY1 $36,000 -- or $120 per hour -- for 190 hours of footage the news network requested through New York’s FOI law.

And sometimes, the work is simply too much for a department. The Seattle Police Department stopped its body-camera plan in 2014 after an anonymous person asked for all videos from dashboard-mounted cameras and planned to request them from body-worn ones.

“I think what we are witnessing is a change in the paradigm of policing,” Russell Covey, a law professor at Georgia State University, told Ars Technica in January. “[It’s] similar to what we saw in the ’50s when police moved from foot patrols to squad car. We’re now seeing the advent of the big data era. This is the future of policing.”

The Obama administration thinks so, too. Through the Justice Department, it gave $20 million in funding last year to police departments to buy 50,000 body-worn cameras -- the first part of a three-year program budgeted at $75 million to determine the cameras’ effectiveness.

“The FOIA element of it was really, I think, a surprise to the entire community,” said Sean Varah, CEO of MotionDSP, which makes video redaction software. “They didn’t think, ‘Uh oh, what happens when we give 2,000 body cams to a police department and they’re recording for the entirety of a shift?’”

This challenge affects police departments of all sizes.

“Large departments will have dedicated evidence-handling people and so we make their job easier and flexible,” said Tom Guzik, CEO of IRSA Video, which partnered with ruggedized device maker Getac to deliver end-to-end police video management systems. “Smaller departments -- there’s 18,000 police departments and the majority of them are 50 staff or less” -- often do not have the staff to deal with video redaction, he said. “It’s usually someone’s responsibility, so we make it easier for them to actually do the task.”

This lack of expertise is the main obstacle to fulfilling FOI requests, said Ed Claughton, president of PRI Management Group, a law enforcement information management consultancy based in Coral Gables, Fla.

“The biggest things that we’re seeing is that [police departments] don’t have the time or the resources or the expertise to be able to redact the footage according to what the law requires,” Claughton said. “Believe it or not, we’ve seen agencies that don’t give out the record at all. Conversely, I’ve seen agencies that give out the entire view unredacted. Both of those approaches would be violations of the law.”

Looking for third-party help

As they struggle with fulfilling FOI requests quickly while also adhering to privacy requirements, police departments are looking to vendors to help ease the burden. As a quick fix, some departments use commercially available video editing software such as Adobe Premiere. Even simpler is the Custom Blurring tool that YouTube released late last month that lets users blur any object in motion. But more targeted solutions are cropping up.

Ikena Spotlight is one solution that aims to let police departments respond to FOI requests more efficiently and cost-effectively. California-based MotionDSP began making Ikena Spotlight about five years ago to redact video from surveillance cameras. Since then, the company has added algorithms to redact footage from cameras in motion -- such as body cams -- and is getting ready to launch the latest version this spring with audio redaction and modulation, improved tracking and a faster workflow for decoding and encoding video.

To use Ikena Spotlight, an official opens a video file through the Windows-based software program and then selects the time range needed. The software works like a video player but has an interface that lets users click on the objects to redact. Officials can select the type of redaction -- blur or black out, for example -- and when they’re done, the software saves the redacted video to the hard drive.

It works on any computer, but Varah said some departments opt for high-performing machines to run the software because of the file sizes involved.

“There’s a fair amount of compute required in doing this kind of sophisticated tracking or any kind of redaction. Because when you do redaction, you basically have to decode the video, you’ve got to process all the pixels through the processor of the computer and then you’ve got to re-enter the video out to disk again,” he said. “These body cams are very high-resolution. Some of them are 720p or even 1080p so that’s 2 megapixels per frame. It’s an enormous amount of data.”

The key ingredient for Ikena Spotlight, Varah said, is the person using the software. Although some vendors push automation, he said the human element is crucial.

“Because redaction requirements are different in every jurisdiction, it’s very hard to make an automated solution that knows what to redact and what not to redact, so we let the human do that,” he said. “If something goes wrong in a redaction and a person’s face even in a single frame is not blurred -- the face of a minor or the face of a witness or the face of an undercover police officer -- the potential liability, it can put someone’s life at risk…. In these cases with really high-stakes video footage, you can’t afford to not have a human involved.”