Chicago cops under fire for astonishingly high dashcam, mic failures More than one in ten dashboard cameras and 80 per cent of microphones don't work on any given day, according to a review of the Chicago Police's recording equipment. The incredibly high failure rate has led to some pointed questions, and added to a general sense of distrust of officers in The Second City. It follows the …
"this would only excuse/explain expense (I bet high) and not quality (or lack of thereof)"
It would be associated with poor quality (such as American car manufacturers, or American houses - often built in wood with similar build quality to a European garden shed...) by most Europeans who would prefer European or Chinese made goods as higher quality options...
Presumably they purchased the "Made in USA" ones...
"All what we got here's
American made
It's a little bit cheesey,
But it's nicely displayed
Well we don't get excited when it
Crumbles 'n' breaks
We just get on the phone
And call up some flakes
They rush on over
'n' wreck it some more
'n' we are so dumb
They're linin' up at our door..."
Frank Zappa
"That there are African-Americans in Chicago?!"
Yep. Lots of - hence very high levels of homicides and gun violence - hence also police that have to react in certain a manner to defend themselves from that environment.
(According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008 whilst being ~ 13% of the US population.)
The Chicago police has some of the worst reputation in the country. There's a reason for that.
True.
So while the rest of the police forces in the USA have quality American-made equipment that is meticulously maintained, in the corrupt city of Chicago they DELIBERATELY use substandard equipment, let the maintenance contract expire, deliberately aim the cameras so they catch nothing, THROW THE MICROPHONES ON THE ROOF OF THE POLICE STATION...
...and here El Reg is making sad weak excuses for obvious corruption in Obama's home city?
We were recently amazed to discover Windows XP being used on a new British warship, although the Navy subsequently promised it would be pulled out before the ship set sail.
I thought that the venerable ElReg had already published an article that disputed the fact that XP was seen lurking in the decks.
"'I saw a 10-inch floppy drive unit in a storage closet.' It was probably left there because nobody could source 10" floppies to use with it."
Probably not. It's quite likely that they have 10-inch floppy disks to feed that 10-inch floppy drive. And considering that any data on those 10-inch floppy disks would be official police data, I'd expect that they'd want to be able to read that data in case of necessity. But not want to spend to any resources "pre-emptively" transferring that data to more modern formats.
There's another reason why police departments do not always use the latest technology, as for example in the question "Why does my local police department have Polaroid-type cameras and not digital cameras?" The correct answer to this question is that a Polaroid snapshot is much, much more difficult to alter than a digital image.
This could also, possibly, apply to the 10-inch floppy disks mentioned above where the provenance of evidence and records is important: how much value would 20 year old files have in court if the media on which they are located is only 10 years old and the tech who did the transfer was not available to testify to its authenticity? Not much, or none, if the objecting attorney is any good.
You beat me to it. I am reasonably certain there is no such thing as a10" floppy disk. I remember 8" floppies, (they were very floppy) but I have never heard of a 10" and even google only seemed to return 8 inch versions. I think 8" floppies were teh first ever an dthey only got smaller from that point.
The Chicago Sun-Times also highlighted a case where a number of police microphones were spotted on the roof of a police station – seemingly thrown there by officers.
Now while there are some very valid excuses about the crappy quality of these devices, it seems that launching these devices onto the roof is not likely to improve their surveillance capabilities. However one of the local ball clubs might want to look into the throwing arm of these fine men in blue.
Chicago, Chicago, You make me want to go elsewhere.
I remember reading that the military had, or have, lots of surplus and outdated equipment they don't know what to do with, so it gets sold off, or perhaps loaned, at enormously reduced prices to the police. I believe there also exist certain clauses in the contract for this equipment that if they do not use it within a certain period then they lose it. A use it or lose it clause on big guns and vehicles sounds like a dubious idea to me.
"It is easy to reach a conclusion that the cops are purposefully not using, or are damaging their equipment in order to avoid accountability. But the answer, of course, is a little more complex."
No doubt and most police officers are good people just trying to do their job and have absolutely no desire to shoot anyone dead.
But the question becomes: why is the equipment of poor quality and why has the maintenance contract been allowed to lapse and why are the directives and guidelines so ambiguous?
And the answer to those questions may well be that the department doesn't view this as something important. Yes, there was the McDonald but it's not as though that was the first contentious incident so if the department was really looking to sort things out, this program would have been a real priority a long time ago. That it evidently wasn't says a lot.
"But the question becomes: why is the equipment of poor quality and why has the maintenance contract been allowed to lapse and why are the directives and guidelines so ambiguous? ... And the answer to those questions may well be that the department doesn't view this as something important. "
I think that most police departments have much less financial discretion than you seem to believe. And of course, contracts for all supplies and services are awarded to the lowest bidder, in accordance with the wise old proverb "Buy cheap, get cheap".
@Turtle
Accepted and I agree that that is likely true in many instances. However, the core problem remains even if it has shifted to someone else and that problem is that this issue is not a concern for whoever does make these decisions.
Yes, a big case like the McDonald one puts the spotlight on it but as I said, that was hardly the first contentious incident where there has been an issue with missing audio/video that should have been captured but due to throughly preventable factors, wasn't.
And it's not as though such things have been out of the public eye - they are known and discussed so it doesn't even matter whether individual officers have brought this to the attention of their supervisors or whether those supervisors have brought it to the attention of the decision-makers.
It shouldn't take a case THIS tragic and an officer being tried for FIRST DEGREE MURDER to do some serious investigation into these systems. That it did implies that they (whoever 'they' are) simply turned a blind eye to the problem or, more likely, insisted that there wasn't a problem at all.
But even then, if this sorry state is not the department's fault one still has to wonder if they ever made any real noise to the people whose fault it actually is. When police make public calls for equipment it tends to be a relatively poor move, politically, to deny them.
It's a good job that the Chicago police force, along with the guardians of law and order in so any of America's most racial diverse cities, enjoy the universal respect and approval of the public - or there might be some concern over this perfectly understandable level of equipment failure.
I do hope no dastardly miscreants escaped justice because people doubted the word of the redoubtable officers who lacked recorded evidence of the suspects confession
Well 'diverse' is not always a good term because it depends on how you measure 'diversity'. Chicago is almost perfectly split into thirds with black, white and Hispanic (33%, 32%, 29%). So it's very diverse in that no one group predominates. But that's just three groups and very broad ones at that. Asian groups only make up a tiny percent, as do the wonderfully generic 'other races'.
More interesting is that Chicago's racial groups are concentrated in different areas such that this diversity is almost an illusion when one looks at any given area.
This is one of the big problems with the idea of 'multiculturalism' as it's currently touted - racial diversity is not the same thing as having a harmonious blend of people from different races and cultures. The benefits of multiculturalism can never be fully realised when different groups are concentrated in specific areas.
Indeed, such a situation can lead to exactly this type of problem.
Dirty little secret for years in physical security is how low the "uptime" is for video surveillance; typically around 70%. City of Philadelphia audited their city-wide surveillance system and found it worked only 32% of the time (http://www.viakoo.com/orphaned-video-system-in-philadelphia/). End result is police never look at it because they know it's incomplete at best.
You mean the movies are lying to us when they show the FBI/CIA/NSA plus every hacker able to instantly access surveillance cameras (without even having to google what the site name is!) at every location in every major city within seconds and even have the magical ability to zoom in on pixellated images?
Amazing how well that all works but they often lose track of a car driving through a major city because they entered a "dead zone" where there are no cameras (if it fits the plot) That's probably the one thing they have the best chance of getting right, since those traffic cameras seem to be at every intersection that has a stoplight even in the comparatively small city I live in. No idea if they're operational, but no way someone could drive through downtown and find a "dead zone" until the left the areas where there are traffic lights.
Chicago is indeed one of America's most corrupt. I lived there for 4 years. So much cash in that city, so much of it pissed away. So many drugs flowing up from Mexico, lots of "other cash" now available too. I don't think Chi-town will ever shed it's love affair with crime.
As for the upkeep of the equipment, that is just a symptom of the corrupt bureaucracy which is Chicago.
I wish Chicago well.
Until cops (or any public "service"; BTW, there's no draft and the job is paid for so let's stop this farce and call it a job, like any other out there) operate from "when in doubt we're right" positions this kind of failures is the only expected outcome. Once we shifted the accountability and burden of proof onto them (as it should be), they will make sure that the toys we paid for with taxes (besides guns of course) is well maintained and always operational.
Good point. If a cop gets into a struggle and this cheap junk fails, suspicion of sabotage automatically falls on the officer. And yet these cameras fail even when NOT subjected to abuse. The only way a cop can protect him/herself from this potential exposure to unfair punishment is to disable the unit proactively.
Thanks. I did try looking it up; but have had beer, so didn't try that hard. Also El Reg's search facility sucks raw donkey prong is not the best.
So. A police dept has many equipment failures. Given that they have an illegal and massively unconstitutional secret Gitmo all of their very own; I'd be looking at just how convenient these failures were on a case-by-case basis. Sabotage, lack of maintenance, bad policy or cheap equipment or a number of other factors could all weigh in, of course; but I'd be taking "equipment failure" with a wheelbarrow of salt. Lucky for Chicago PD I'm not the investigator, I suppose. Lucky for me too, because I'm on a different continent and still alive.
Yes I live in Chicago and have been for the last 40+ years.
Chicago isn't unique in the IT department, sadly for years it has used obsolete equipment. I walked in to a Data Center one day about 30 years ago and was flabbergasted at the condition of the data center. People were smoking in the computer room old boxes of forms were strewn about and the place was just filthy. In another place the CRT's were brown with tobacco stains and wiring was exposed all over the place.
Chicago has two issues.
1. Is Politics they hire not from the average crowd but hire from the politically connected.
2. They scrimp to the last decimal point on all IT expenditures and they end up getting the worst equipment as a result.
I had one person that left the city and attempted to find a job in the private sector and no one would hire him as his knowledge was 20 years out of date. I suggested he go back to school to get caught up (not that most of the schools in Chicago were really current at the time) but at least he would be playing in the same ballpark.
The first, and largest, floppies were 8 inches, first marketed circa 1971 when Jon Pertwee was Doctor Who. There were a lot of variants, with soft versus hard sectoring, double sided versus single sided and several recording densities being differentiation points.
Circa 1976, during the Tom Baker years, Wang requested a smaller, cheaper floppy which drove the development of the 5.25 inch format offering similar variations to its bigger cousin. You could also physically hack a single sided 5.25 inch to become a flippy.
In early 1980s, many smaller variants were developed until everyone settled on the 3.5 inch format and Peter Davison.
The point of all this being that there never was a 10 inch floppy. There were some specialist 10, 12 and 14 inch optical media dating back to the 80s. Perhaps Officer Plod saw a 3.5 inch drive and made an understandable mistake? I blame the metric system.
There's been some criticism of the Met for not having working body cam of their recent shooting too.
The UK cameras (one type, I think there are two) have a battery life of 40 minutes, and so are not on for a 10 hour shift or even the drive to an incident (because you might be stuck doing surveillance for 2 hours beforeany action). They're also not waterproof so tend to fail quickly in the UK climate.
It's not an easy challenge - even GoPro can't get significantly higher battery life or decent audio out of a waterproof camera.
@ Adam 52
the most basic GoPro will at worst shoot 1080p 60fps for 1:30 & at best 1080p 30fps for 2:05, significantly better than the 40mins you quote!
i'm sure a cop version with external battery pack could be made to work for longer.
http://shop.gopro.com/hero4/hero4-session/CHDHS-101.html
Opposite seems to happen to me, several computers in an industrial area (High levels of dust etc...), I wanted to put in place proper industrial machines as I said the standard desktops wouldn't last 6 months. Was told to use them anyway.
6 years later still going on, vents 100% clogged and me screaming "Stop proving me wrong!"
...much of this type of hardware remains broken or out of service due to a variety of reasons including no funding, inept service techs, poor quality hardware, apathy and much more. Chicago has a lot of problems not just police or their equipment. More people die from gun violence in Chicago everyday than anywhere in the U.S. and much of it is gang related. Access to guns is not the problem. Misuse of guns is the problem. Any gangbanger can get a black market gun, anywhere in the world. Having properly operating police equipment may just prove that the force used was justified. Without it functioning properly, we'll never know.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
