It’s no news the police body camera market has been growing rapidly in the past few years. But, attached to rapid growth, always comes unexpected issues. Because of the Freedom of Information Act, police departments found themselves spending thousands of dollars every year on redacting videos to be released to the public. Aside from being costly, video redaction is a job nobody wants to commit to because it’s simply monotonous and time-consuming. With that in mind, body camera manufacturers started implementing basic and advanced video redaction features in their evidence management software, and it has been a game-changer for police officers.
Basic video redaction is done manually. Officers have to draw the shape of the area being blurred and drag it around as the face or object being redacted moves. If the object doesn’t move around too much, it’s no problem, but if there’s a lot of movement in the video, it becomes a tedious and tiring operation. It’s easy to understand why police officers don’t want to do it, but, luckily for them, there’s a way around it. Advanced redaction, which is done automatically through artificial intelligence technology, is a much easier and faster way of performing such a task. The computer automatically identifies what needs to be redacted, such as faces or license plates, and blurs them out, making them unrecognizable throughout the entire length of the video. But nothing is perfect, and neither is automatic redaction. Commonly, its accuracy rate is of 99%, meaning the user would still need to edit a few frames. In most cases, this advanced feature is only included in premium packages, meaning you won’t find it in basic packages of evidence management software, but it’s a feature that’s well worth paying for, considering the amount of time and resources police departments can save by utilizing it.
Medium-sized and large police departments that still don’t take advantage of video redaction are falling behind. That’s thousands of dollars and countless hours of work they could be saving. WOLFCOM offers free video redaction included in its evidence management software. Our main priority is to make sure our clients are always satisfied, that’s why we always do our best to stay ahead of the game by bringing top-of-the-line technology in every product and service we offer.