Afterwards I found a chatroom thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of theft no one would look at the footage. He said he had tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all. You don’t watch the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it wasn’t there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It’s very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of theft. This argument didn’t go down well.
I get the sentiment, but you want them to waste public resources doing it on all these different clunky uis and software? Sometimes these take minutes to load new information to parse.
Maybe waste your time pinpointing it instead of expecting public resources to do what you could do for them?
In what world do random citizens own and operate the security cameras of, well, anything? As opposed to the people that work there, or I dont know the police? Whose job is allegedly to solve crimes?
Oh shit, a few minutes to do their job. The fucking horror, wouldn’t want to cut into their being an utter fucking bastard time, where they’re probably harassing a minority or beating their wife.
Who is “you” in this sentence? I mean, I could probably write security camera software, but I don’t, and have no plans to. I imagine most of the people here are the same.
So when there is a pothole in front of your driveway, you’re going out and filling it in yourself, right? Because why waste the city’s valuable time when you could do it yourself?
Okay so genius, are the cops going to provide the footage for the person to watch themselves to narrow down the time?
How the fuck do you expect this person to work it out if the ones with access to the evidence to do so refuse to do so?
And further fucking more, how is doing their job, wasting public money? There’s a lot of money wasted on police, investigating a robbery for a real person is not one of them.
Yeah, every time I have ever had to hand over footage to the police for thefts at our family store, I clip and organizr that shit. I also include a paper identifying each file, the timestamps and what happened during them, any details I identified that they can corroborate (physical description, identifiable clothing/tattoos, make and model of vehicle, license plate number, etc.). I often end up putting in 1-2 hours of work on it watching, editing and transferring footage.
If you want traction and results from the police, you need to make it as easy as possible for them by doing the heavy lifting yourself. The cynical view is that thats because they just don’t care, but also, in fairness, your case is one of dozens of cases on their desk and the cases never stop coming. This is your priority, so put in the effort instead of expecting others do so. That being said, that is much easier when you have direct access to the cctv footage. I’m guessing this student didnt.
I do not get why it would work in that case. I assume the scenario is someone with a bike coming, doing theft, then leaving with the same bike.
Therefore there will be a period without bike, then a period with bike, then a period without bike again.
Let’s assume there is no bike on the particular moment viewed. How do you know whether it occured before or after the theft? If you make the wrong decision, you get stuck on an endless binary search… Unless you take note at each timestamp where you made the decision, draw a tree of timestamps, and go back the tree if your search is fruitless but that’s much more complicated than what this post says.
You’re making this way more complicated than it actually is. The guy definitely can give estimates for when he parked the bike and when he found out that it was stolen. It’s not that complicated.
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