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Posts Tagged ‘police’

The city of Canberra is installing a suite of new point-to-point speed cameras, which read a car’s license plate to calculate its average speed between two set points. The system can thereby determine whether a driver is traveling within the speed limit. But Aussie authorities also mulled other uses for the two-camera technology, like using them to detect stolen cars or unregistered vehicles. Or integrating them into a broader surface-to-air surveillance network.

“A specific benefit would derive if the P2P cameras were linked to UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) which could track vehicles of interest,” a senior police officer wrote, according to government documents reported in the Canberra Times.

This was apparently discussed sometime last year, but it just became public under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by political opposition leaders. Several groups oppose the idea, according to the Times.

It would not be the first time a domestic police agency aimed to use aerial support for its vehicle-surveillance work. The UK is leading the way on several such projects. A couple British towns set up trials that integrated satellite surveillance with the P2P cameras, as we told you last year. And in March 2010, a quadrotor drone got its first-ever collar when it helped policetrack down a car thief.

The Brits also have plans to deploy UAVs for domestic monitoringduring the 2012 Olympics, where they could be used to watch ATM machines, prevent theft of equipment and even “monitoring antisocial driving,” as the Guardian put it last year.

In the U.S., FAA regulations remain a roadblock for police forces hoping to fly drones, but some police departments are testing drones for eventual use.

This Australian concept raises a few unique questions, however. The P2P cameras have been controversial because they empower a computer to hand out speeding tickets — there's no human accuser a driver can confront. This is one reason some Australian Opposition authorities are writing legislation that would prevent any fines from being issued, at least for the first few months, according to the Times story. Involving a drone just adds another layer of civil rights and privacy concerns.

[Canberra Times via Slashdot]

Clickhere to launch a gallery of auto-gyros, gyroplanes, autogiros, or whatever they're called, from the PopSci archives

The MTOsport is headquartered in Tomball, Texas, and at $75,000 costs a fraction of what a police force would spend on a helicopter. Operating costs are low too, at just $50 an hour, largely because it runs on regular pump gas.

The roofless, doorless contraption uses a rear-mounted propeller for speed, and an unpowered, angled rotor, spinning at 80 to 120 RPM, uses the air pushed into the blades from forward motion to create lift. It needs a little more than a hundred yards to take off, and then climbs into the air at a rate of 13 feet per second, eventually hitting speeds of up to 115 mph. Despite the lack of roof, the auto-gyro is arguably safer than a helicopter because it's always in autorotation. If power is lost, helicopter pilots have to ease their aircrafts down and hope that autorotation engages. The MTOsport would just glide down gently.

On the downside, no roofs or doors means riding in bad weather will be rough, and without thermal imaging cameras or large light beams, auto-gyros are best flown during the day. Even with these limitations though, the cost and efficiency of the auto-gyro makes it incredibly helpful for police forces in underserved areas like Tomball. The MTOsport can be in the air and on a mission within 10 minutes, and, in terms of coverage, is equal to the deployment of 20 officers, according to Tomball's chief of police.

[Jalopnik]

We’ve seen how easily biometrics can be used to identify people based on their Internet photos, using something as simple as an iPhone app. Cops themselves are using this technology to ID people on the street — so why wouldn’t intrepid motorcycle gang leaders do the same?

The Australian Federal Police is researching how social media may impact covert ops. In a survey last winter, they found the vast majority of law enforcement officers were using social media — 90 percent of females and 81 percent of males, with Facebook and Twitter the top two sites, respectively. Nearly half of those surveyed said they used the sites daily, while another 24 percent used them weekly, according to ComputerWorld Australia.

The worst news, from a cop’s perspective: “All respondents aged 26 years or younger had uploaded photos of themselves onto the Internet,” ComputerWorld reports. And 85 percent of respondents said someone else had uploaded photos of them. What’s more, 42 percent of respondents said they could identify someone based on his or her social media relationships, ComputerWorld says.

“The 16-year-olds of today who might become officers in the future have already been exposed,” Mick Keelty, a former Australian Federal Police commissioner, said at a security conference in Sydney.

This covers Australia, not the U.S., but it’s reasonable to expect the numbers would be somewhat similar in this country. If so, that means the next generation of undercover agents may have to go to even greater extremes to win the trust of the groups they’re trying to infiltrate. It can already take several years to do this. Maybe future cops should adopt the adage used by aspiring politicians: Decide at age 5 and act accordingly.

[ComputerWorld Australia]

One Facebook user warned Jason Valdez that a SWAT officer was hiding in the bushes outside the motel room where he was holed up with a hostage.

“Thank you homie,” Valdez replied. “Good looking out.”

Valdez, 36, is in critical condition after shooting himself in the chest as SWAT officers stormed his hotel room, according to the AP.

Valdez was charged with drug possession back in March, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest when he didn’t show up for court June 1. Police tried to serve him with a felony drug warrant Friday afternoon, and he barricaded himself inside the Western Colony Inn in Ogden, AP said. He said he was with a woman named Veronica, who police described as a hostage.

His first Facebook post, updated at 11:23 p.m. Friday, reads in part: “I'm currently in a standoff ... kinda ugly, but ready for whatever. I love u guyz and if I don't make it out of here alive that I'm in a better place and u were all great friends.”

In all, he posted six updates, including pictures of himself and Veronica. He received more than 100 comments from family and friends, many of whom pleaded with him to “do the right thing,” AP notes. Others offered words of support, even “liking” his update about shooting at police. Click through to the AP's account for a full re-telling of the tale.

Now the police are debating whether to charge any of his friends with obstruction of justice for hampering a police investigation. His friends' responses, including words of support and details about the scene, gave him an advantage, police said.

This could be a new realm for law enforcement and attorneys — how do you file charges for activity that happened in an online setting?

"We're not sure yet how to deal with it," said Ogden Lt. Danielle Croyle.

[AP]

Appropriately named Sherlock, Miss Marple, and Columbo (what, no Jessica Fletcher?), the three vultures are being trained in a bird park in northern Germany, where investigators hope their sharp eyesight and super-sensitive senses of smell--highly tuned to the olfactory signatures of decaying flesh, of course--will prove them better than dogs for searching large swaths of territory for bodies. They also hope the newly deputized vulture detectives won't peck at the corpses after they're found.

Police are using three birds because vultures like to roam in groups--though reportedly Sherlock has a frustrating tendency to hunt on foot rather than on the wing. It’s an experiment for sure, but if it works vultures could join police ranks everywhere. Inquiries have already come in from Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere in Germany.

[BBC]

The power of natural fibers

Tightly woven wool reduces the number of Kevlar layers required to stop a bullet from 36 to 30, and wool’s water-absorption qualities could make Kevlar more effective in wet situations. While Kevlar is used in ropes, wetsuits and other underwater applications, its bulletproof-ness is reduced by about 20 percent when it’s wet, so most Kevlar vests are waterproofed in a time-consuming process.

Wool would absorb some of the water and expand, strengthening the vest’s overall penetration resistance, researchers say.

Rajiv Padhye, a textile technologist at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Australia, developed the new blend.

Kevlar has formed the basis of body armor used by military and police forces since the 1970s, but vests made with the polymer can be cumbersome and heavy. Chemists and textile scientists have designed some strong, lightweight alternatives, which include nanowire threads and shear-thickening liquids. But plain old wool would be a far cheaper and simpler option.

Padhye and colleagues at RMIT worked with a firm called Australian Defence Apparel, which provides gear to the Australian Defence Force, to develop and commercialize the new material. But the company was unimpressed at first — on a 25-layer prototype, bullets pierced the vest when it was wet, according to the Australian news site Cosmos Magazine.

Padhye said the prototypes have been strengthened after further testing.

Padhye said the wool-Kevlar blend meets international standards against handgun force, and he has applied for a patent, hoping to license the technology to military and police customers.

[Cosmos.com]

The new computer system found a match 45 percent of the time

When police are trying to find a suspect in a serious crime, a police sketch artist may be called in to interview witnesses and come up with a rough sketch of the person’s features. Witnesses are asked about a suite of features, like crooked mouth, pointy nose and so on. But in some cases, beyond classifiers like age and race, it can be hard to come up with an accurate depiction. There are a few software programs that generate a composite image, but they can be less accurate than a trained forensic artist, according to Michigan State University.

Enter the algorithm, which combines artist sketches with crime databases and sniffs out suspects based on their features. It works by identifying structural similarities between the sketch and a photo, like the shape of the eyes, nose and chin, according to Anil Jain, director of the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing lab at the MSU engineering department.

The researchers tested it using a database of 10,000 mug shot photos and some sketches provided by the Michigan State Police, and it performed better than a commercial face-recognition system, MSU said. It got the right person 45 percent of the time. That's not exactly perfect, but it's not bad, either, considering some people might not be in a mug shot database at all.

Witnesses' memories can be unreliable, especially in the violent situations that would normally warrant a police sketch. But combining a police sketch with real mug shots could speed up the process of finding suspects and arresting the right person.

All the sketches were from real crimes where the suspect was later identified, so the team could check the computer’s results.

The researchers plan to field test it with real suspects next year, MSU says.

[MSU News]