My lad’s bike was stolen from a train station a few months back. He’d left it there while he was at work. He works for longer than an hour a day, like many others.
This was the BTP’s response, so it’s kind of mad to see that it’s actual policy now.
Really makes you glad to pay the old national insurance and council tax, y’know?
OC text by @DJDarren@sopuli.xyz
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As someone who occasionally has to scrub through hours of security camera footage, these cops need to learn what a binary search is. We had some art get stolen from our gallery, and I had to search through ~5 days of footage to find it. I found it in about 3 minutes with a binary search.
Start by defining your timeline. In my case, it was about 5 days (so roughly 120 hours) over the course of a long weekend. Then divide that time in half, (60 hours) and start at the middle. Is the artwork still there? If so, you know you don’t need to bother scrubbing through the first 60 hours at all. Or if it’s already missing, you know you don’t need to bother searching through the second half. Then divide the remaining half in half again, (30 hours) and do the same. Repeat, each time dividing the potential search by half. With only 10 divisions, (each taking only a few seconds to figure out what the next halfway point is and jump to it in the security camera program), I have already narrowed my search down from 5 days to ~7 minutes. And it only took me a few minutes total. And at that point, I just scrub through manually until I find the culprit.
My boss was just sitting at her computer, watching the video at like 2x speed from hour 0, hoping to eventually catch the person. After like 20 minutes of that she gave up and passed it off to me. And I had the incident found in like 3 or 4 minutes total.
The only real reason the cops have to avoid scrubbing through footage is laziness.
Lol I would do that instinctively I think
Almost every thought process you think is common sense has a name, because it isn’t common sense to everyone, and needs to be taught to some. Everyone has their blind spots.
git bisectbut for videos
Smells like the cops strongarming the public for funding increases. It’d be better for the railway to just hire bike concierge.
Hmmm… 🤔 what about stopping investigate car thefts as well? Let the car owners (or their insurance) find PIs themselves.
In a list of crimes the BTP will not investigate, it also said thefts on trains should only be reported if the passenger knows the exact carriage.
Any bikes stolen worth less than £200 will not be investigated, neither will car thefts if the vehicle has been left for more than two hours.
Way ahead of you. They already did.
The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV footage for these offences, the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains…
Funny they say this, implying they’ll be putting a BTP officer or two at every station to keep a lookout. Obviously that’s not going to happen.
I’m not sure of the politics around the BTP’s funding, but this pullback on responsibilities smells like they are short on officers or money or both.
I want to say I’m outraged, but outrage required an element of surprise. So I guess I’m just pissed.
"Our experience tells us at an early stage that there are some crimes that are unlikely to ever be solved – such as those without a clear estimate of time or location for the incident or if there is a lack of CCTV or witnesses.
“The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV footage for these offences, the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm and providing a visible presence across the network.”
Well which is it, a lack of CCTV footage or a lack of time/police resources? They seem to flipping back and forth between these 2 excuses, even when camera evidence is available.
But if you abolish the police, who will come help you when your bike is stolen???
The exact same people who help you now.
Seems like automated video processing could dramatically reduce staff time required to “watch video”. Load up the start, draw a box around the bike, then software finds time when bike is removed (or flags smaller number of substantial changes for human review).
I mean there’s several more efficient options than watching 1x video all the way until the bike is stolen. Just looking at hourly timepoint from placement and then narrowing from there (sped up) would be fairly straightforward. Mathematically half points would be most efficient. So like 0-800 check 400 if bikes gone check 200 if not check 600, etc using half points you’d be able to find the steal pretty quickly.
Excellent point. Or if the video is processed similarly to something like YouTube you could just drag the slider along until the bike is gone. Maybe I just don’t understand the argument for only investigating thefts that occur in a short time period…
The argument is that they’re too lazy and seemingly too stupid. My point is more so you can catch the crime even without relying on something like an AI. This is a problem with the person not the tools available.
Fit your bikes with anti theft devices. Landmine under the seat.
