A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles.
The footage shows that William McNeil Jr., 22, was sitting in the driver’s seat, asking to speak to the Jacksonville deputies’ supervisor, when authorities broke his window, punched him in the face, pulled him from the vehicle, punched him again and threw him to the ground.
We need open source, multi channel dashcams that record to a central box that can be hidden deep inside the car and in times of duress, livestream via a connected smartphone. Press a button, the camera connects to a smartphone and triggers an app. All channels, audio and video, livestream out via the smartphone.
Or skip the cell phone pairing. Keep an eSIM in the recorder and upload it that way. Easier said than done, I suppose.
Blackvue has SIM card options with cloud storage. My blackvue 4K can do it But you have to pay a subscriber fee to them for the storage.
I bought it because it’s the only camera I could find that could handle reading a license plate at 30 ft. I never activated the SIM features.
And their camera’s processing and memory cards are all mounted on the windshield for some stupid reason.
Having a small discreet 4 or 6 channel camera that writes to an SSD hidden inside the car and has a 4g radio attachment, or even connects to a hotspot would be massive.
This would be much more expensive. It would also create a weak point. Cops tell cell phone carriers to kill that SIM and you’ll never notice. If it goes through your phone the cost is lower and you’ll notice a service interruption.
Hey, I planned that out over a period of about thirty seconds. My plan is solid!
I’ve been kicking this idea around for months. I just haven’t been able to solve all the problems with it. The biggest among them is small wide angle low light cameras with decent frame rate and resolution are NOT cheap. If I can solve that problem th rest would actually be pretty simple.
You’re sacrificing light for the wide angle. Increase the sensitivity to fix that and you’re introducing noise. Extend the exposure time for each frame to reduce noise and you get motion blur. I know, it sucks. You can’t win. Best of luck, my friend.
Exactly. I can get around some of this to some extent by sacrificing resolution for frame rate and just allowing distorting the image of it just letting showing things as they happen and that could address light sensitivity but that means sacrificing detail which could be important too. I dunno. I haven’t been able to solve this cheaply. There’s definitely off the shelf solutions to this but nothing at all affordable.
U use the cell phone…
The cell phone presents issues when used by itself. It can’t catch what actually happened and led to an event, so cops can lie. It only catches one angle, so it cant see everything. It requires you to directly handle it so it can be wrestled away and destroyed.
I mean I have a blackvue dual cam system setup going to a phone which is in a holder to act as driver view, all backed up to cloud.