Stories of Projects I completed

Story 2 - Police Cameras - Dash to Body

This one is going to be a little longer. This is the evolution of dash cams to body cams in police cars and how we transferred the video and how the evidence was handled by the CSO's (Community service officers)  and how it got to and from the car to evidence... It can be funny, so you can giggle sometimes about how technology works when you are in the trenches.  I had an ongoing joke that I was about two years in and they would still bring me strange computers and computer systems I didn't know about.  The one I always think about is the little mini windows CE computer that sits in little box next to a road with thick black wires. Those wires go to the road when cars pass over so they can count how many cars. 
So, at my job we had at least 10 to 15 applications with no or little support when I got there. Some were extremely old versions with antiquated databases, so things that were not integrated to other things and workers would have to do a lot more work on bad systems to get the numbers into other systems. My main goal was to update everything get support for everything get the all the money that costs for that in the budget because I found out that if you actually paid the money for the new software an use their tech support to keep it running with my support knowledge and train people how to use it. It will cost a lot less than putting band aids on old stuff. 90% of companies and people do the band aid thing you heard me you get the fix way more efficient anyway back to today's story. 
I was doing all the computer systems in the town by myself with an intern.  My biggest frustration was with two computers we had in each car and they were big computers that sat in the back. One with a monitor and the other just the dash cam 4 inch monitor. I was already an expert with computers in cars because I followed people putting computers in the cars to play MP3s before you can get an MP3 player or play your phone with Bluetooth.
It was before SSDs and we always had problems with disk corruption. Not only that but part of my job if giving access to is the workers efficiency. Not sure how many people run computer departments sit down with everyone to see how they do their work to make everything more efficient top to bottom and integrate with how other people do their work. 
To offload video files, the CSO  would go to the police car pull out the full hard drive and put in a blank hard drive. She would then go to her desk sit down copy the files onto a computer and then copy them to her computer, then burn DVDs.  We even went through multiple rounds of making that as efficient and automated as possible with some software, etc. The reason why I remember the details on this project is we did a town wide town wide ID badge project and you know that was a way more difficult than it should have been so I spent a lot of time at that computer on both of those seemingly at the same time through several years. 
Finally I was able to hire a part time number two person . This guy who runs the town right now is extremely smart and the first thing I did was gave him most of the police stuff and I helped but this is probably further back so let me go to the next evolution and then he comes in OK so to eliminate the hard drive swap. We hired or we were already working with some consultants with police stuff they are the ones that supported the software and they put together or wireless thing where the car would automatically transmit the files wireless to several antennas on the building to a server and then the server would write the disk I don't know what the big thing was having for having this and label him categorizing them. I have been a security expert for a long time and did not like that even with the security that we had and we always had issues where some files would get stuck. 
Finally as we were working on a super major police department back end server upgrades, I had many many meetings with the county to corroborate and get input. 
One thing I already worked on were Tasers believe it or not. The Taser company also made body cams and some Tasers have USB plugs that have the date and time. I worked on our Taser project an we only had date and time an when you fire them they spew out the confetti. Every year they would try to get us to sign a waiver to get taste and I would not. But they would do it outside my window and watch him do it into cardboard because they wouldn't volunteer either. 
So back to the body camps we evaluated the Taser body cams and some other ones and can't remember which ones we went with. We did choose Amazon as the storage function and before I left this is one of the projects that was done and I remember seeing and talking to the guys that it was awesome. The camera would sit on their shoulder constantly record a buffer well first let me back up. When the officer goes on his shift he would go into the room and get his camera. Each officer is assigned to their own camera and it sits on a charging base. This way when he walks in his camera is always charged and is never excuse not to have your camera for various reasons because we had built in safeguards if you plugged in your camera an all the files didn't save and it didn't charge I would get an alert or someone in the Police Department would get alert to swap the camera or to fix the camera. 
I remember instances where someone did do something for a regular traffic stop and their camera was not working and they got into huge trouble and that wasn't a big giant case it was like hey we need to record everything to have trust of the citizens we want to protect everyone we want to protect them and we want to protect us. So you are a cop you get your camera you put it on your shoulder and you turn it on the camera is designed to work for an entire 12 hour shift constantly recording onto a buffer scrubbing the buffer and moving forward. There is a chest button that is hit to record. I can't remember how long the buffer is. It is anywhere from 30 seconds to maybe even 5 minutes. 
So if you were cop sitting in the car it would work the same as the dash cam someone runs a red light you are trained the first thing to do is to hit the button so then that way since you saw it with your eyes and your cameras pointing in the same direction you would have recorded the infraction that is proof then you're going to record the entire event. The stop, and if there's a chase that will all be recorded with the cop. 
At the end of the shift, the cop comes back sits down in the briefing office and they plug in their camera and it unloads everything and the system is smart enough to automatically attach the video files to each report. 
Now to the sharing side we still have to have a CSO or someone or the sergeant, or Lieutenant that reads the reports that double checks everything is OK. Then if file is needed for court or evidence, it can be shared online securely. They can restrict who sees the files and it may have a timeout date or other restrictions. It was a home run on the police camera project. We went from stone age to space age.
I have a thousand of these projects please let me help the world ha ha ha.