In 2018, a Texas state trooper’s body camera refuted sexual assault claims a woman made against the trooper after she was pulled over for allegedly driving while intoxicated. The allegations were promptly and conclusively refuted after a review of video footage gathered from the officer’s body-worn camera revealed no wrongdoing on the Trooper’s part.

A combination of technology and innovation around the world can help US police departments in multiple ways; from ensuring personal safety, to improving relationships with the community. What can we learn from the most recent developments in policing?

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Once the incident is resolved, it’s necessary to do a root causes analysis and find out why did it happen and what can be done, so it doesn't occur in the future.

As of May 2018, at least 599 law enforcement agencies had purchased drones, according to research by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, Let’s take a look at some specific examples.

Why should police wearbody cameras

Through the years there have been many claims about the perceived benefits and negative effects of body cameras, not only from the media and public opinion but from police officers themselves.

KUSTOM SIGNALS INC is a part of MPD, Inc., headquartered in Owensboro, Kentucky. MPD, Inc. consisting of six wholly-owned subsidiaries, which includes MPD Components, Inc., MPH Industries, Inc., Lion Laboratories Limited, CMI, Inc., MPD (Singapore) PTE LTD, and Kustom Signals, Inc. MPD, Inc. employs over 320 employees worldwide, all committed to producing the highest quality products for their customers. Visit: www.mpdinc.com

Video call tools like Zoom are great because they allow for the fastest communication between team members while also creating a shared mental picture of the situation.

Argus BWC also integrates with Kustom Signals’ innovative digital evidence management technology. Argus Data Vault help law enforcement agencies effectively manage the increasing volume and complexity of digital evidence. Consistent and reliable data management practices help agencies maintain legal and procedural integrity, enhancing investigative and prosecutorial capabilities, as well as ensuring security and compliance. This powerful and highly configurable digital evidence management solution automatically and securely manages video evidence, making things easier for the agency and officers.

Incidents come at great costs, be it directly in the form of loss of potential revenue and loss of current customers or indirectly in the form of degradation of the company’s public image or increased stress for employees.

Chat tools like Slack are useful as they create a timestamped incident timeline, which can be later revisited for postmortem analysis and learnings as well as for incident management KPIs (key performance indicators) like MTTR.

Benefits of policebody cameras

Before alerting the on-call team with any manually reported incident, it’s necessary always to check whether the issue is really due to a system failure or whether there might be a misconfiguration on the client side. This saves the on-call team time and prevents alert fatigue.

Pros and consof policebody camerasEssay

The report also says that BWCs have reduced the number of citizen complaints against law enforcement. According to the report, it was difficult to ascertain whether complaints went down because officers behaved differently on camera, or because citizens filed fewer unfounded complaints, knowing the interactions were recorded. Either way, fewer complaints is a positive result.

What are body-worncameras

After an incident is detected and communicated to the respective on-call person, the investigation and resolution process can start. This process follows along the lines of the scientific method:

As if there hasn’t been enough bad news lately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently released some very troubling numbers concerning traffic fatalities in 2019. Approximately 31,720 people died in motor vehicle crashes throughout the United States between January and September 2021, representing an increase of about 12% over the same period of […]

Incident management is an absolutely vital process for any organization that aims to provide reliable service to its customers. Service outages usually come with significant costs to the business, and teams need to have a solid strategy to deal with them efficiently.

Companies with software products generally tend to have a more standardized approach to incident management with the steps as follows:

Several law enforcement in-car video and body camera vendors offer SaaS file management solutions involving multi-year contracts, where 100% of the customer’s data resides on the cloud to include the database, video files, and application. This SaaS model offers several notable advantages and several significant disadvantages. This white paper will identify the pros and cons of […]

For many officers, video footage from body-worn cameras can feel like a layer of protection. It provides a clearer understanding of what happens during their public encounters and offers a more complete narrative of what transpired when the facts of an incident are contested.

Body cameras help to promote conscientiousness and use of force avoidance in law enforcement. According to the PERF report, in around half of the studies conducted on the use of force, officers wearing cameras used force less than officers without cameras.

External communication of incidents is helpful for multiple reasons; the two main ones are saving customer support resources and maintaining trust with customers.

After an incident is detected and communicated to the respective on-call person, it’s necessary to communicate it both internally and externally. Incident communication is not just acknowledging that an incident exists but also posting any new findings that occur during the investigation and resolution of the incident. The communication and incident resolution processes work very much in tandem.

The best practice is to center any incident communication around a status page, as it allows for easy internal (using password-protected pages with email subscriptions) as well as external communications (using a public status page).

For manually reported incidents, the on-call person is alerted by other team members. Those are often on support or customer success teams and will pass on the incident report from customers.

If funding is an issue for your agency, assistance is available through Kustom Signals and PoliceGrantsHelp. Through this program, your law enforcement agency has the opportunity to receive grant assistance in many areas, including funds to invest in our industry-leading body-worn cameras, in-car video technology and speed enforcement equipment. Learn more about this unique opportunity.

research on body-worncameras andlaw enforcement

According to the Police Executive Research Forum, by 2020, nearly 79 percent of local police officers worked in departments that used BWCs, and all departments serving 1 million or more residents reported using body cameras. Similar increases were reported in sheriff offices, with more than 68 percent using BWCs in 2020.

Incident management is the process used by developer and IT operations teams to respond to system failures (incidents) and restore normal service operations as quickly as possible.

The founding stone of any incident management is a centralized source of truth, which integrates different monitoring and reporting tools into one easily navigable place. Incident management tools like Better Uptime allow for on-call, support, and other teams to collaborate in detecting, communicating, and solving incidents.

There are two ways a new incident can be started within those incident management solutions. First is fully automatic via a monitoring integration, for example, an uptime monitor creating an incident when it spots that homepage is unavailable. The second is a manual report. For example when a customer submits a support ticket that their profile is not loading correctly.

When were body-worncamerasintroduced in the United States

While implementing body-worn cameras may have significant benefits for law enforcement, the cost of implementation can prove to be a barrier. Government Technology recently reported that Massachusetts police departments were embracing BWC, but finding the costs to be prohibitive. In addition to investing in the camera units, there is also the cost of managing the cameras and the associated data.

When body-worn cameras were first introduced as a law enforcement tool, some were skeptical about their usefulness. But they have since proven to be a necessity.

Body worn cameras pros and consessay

Several law enforcement agencies are now starting to believe that 5G can enhance officers’ work, so let’s look into some examples…

The goal of internal incident communication is to align company operations so that the company’s resources loss is minimized by the incident.

They should also include any learnings that came from the incident and what changes can be applied to the system going forward to make it more resilient to similar incidents.

Incident management processes tend to be quite different depending on the type of the company. As different companies use different tools and systems, have different customers and stakeholders, there is no one fits all process.

Facebook downtimes in the last few years are a great example of just how big of an impact outages have. In 2019 Facebook platform didn't work for 14 hours. The cost of this incident is estimated to be around $90 million. In another downtime in 2021, the cost amounted to $65 million in just a few hours.

A year after Detroit launched a $5.2 million program to outfit officers with body cameras, footage has both exonerated and implicated police officers accused of wrongdoing. The videos have also provided insight into what went right or wrong during critical incidents, allowing supervisors to train officers accordingly, said Assistant Chief, James White.

Support and other teams responsible for reporting manual incidents usually submit their incident reports either via calling the on-call number (a static number that automatically reroutes the call to the current on-call person) or by filling in an incident form (usually on a dedicated sharable URL).

In the case of automatically reported incidents, the incident management solution creates an incident once a monitor reports an error. Once the incident is logged, it needs to be communicated to the team - this is done by alerting the current on-call team member.

AI-powered Argus Body Worn Camera technology from Kustom Signals offers a host of proven advantages for law enforcement, including features that extend far beyond typical body-worn camera capabilities. Argus BWC:

By having the whole incident response team on the same call, troubleshooting can be done in real-time, keeping everyone on the same page and allowing for any brainstorming of ideas as well.

By establishing a company status page as the first place to look for any incident information and by communicating clearly what is going on during each incident, customers might restrain from bombarding customer support with questions. And when done properly, customers might even appreciate the honesty of your downtime communication.

In an ideal scenario, the first on-call person is also the person who is able to solve the given incident. According to the practice of “you build it, you run it” the developers being on-call should be the same people who built the software. Those team members are generally more able to solve any issues as they have a much better understanding of the system.

Internal communication includes any teams within the company that might be influenced by the incident. It can include sales, which might be giving demos of non-functioning products, or marketing spending on online ads bringing traffic to a landing page that is down.

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In case of incidents when multiple people are needed to collaborate, it’s necessary to set up team communication channels. It’s best to use a tool that is normally used within the company so that everyone is familiar with it. Tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom are a great fit.

Incident is a broad term describing any event that causes either a decrease in the quality or complete disruption of a given service. Incidents usually require immediate response of the development or operations team, often referred to as on-call or response teams in incident management.

Alerts usually come in the form of automated phone calls for major incidents. Slack & Microsoft teams and email alerts are used for less mission-critical incidents. To make for easier communication of incidents, severity levels are often used when describing incidents.

Postmortems should be written for all major incidents. They should include a detailed timeline of what happened and when. It’s important to include timestamps of:

A growing number of police departments have begun using body-worn cameras as tools for transparency and documentation of civilian interactions.

In some cases however the current on-call team members are unable to resolve the issue without other team members. In that case, it’s necessary to escalate the incident to a relevant person, usually more senior or with specific expertise in the affected system.

As vehicle technologies change and advance, it is important that RADAR and other law enforcement equipment that is used in conjunction with police vehicles adapt. Changes in new vehicle connectivity have made this advancement in RADAR technology extremely important. Kustom Signals is a leading innovator in law enforcement tools and at the industry’s forefront with […]