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.

Hmmm… 🤔 what about stopping investigate car thefts as well? Let the car owners (or their insurance) find PIs themselves.

I want to say I'm outraged, but outrage required an element of surprise. So I guess I'm just pissed.

Smells like the cops strongarming the public for funding increases. It'd be better for the railway to just hire bike concierge.

But if you abolish the police, who will come help you when your bike is stolen???

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).

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.

"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.

Fit your bikes with anti theft devices. Landmine under the seat.