Washington County Sheriff’s Office transforms its video redaction with Secure Redact
James Bieker, Investigations Technical Specialist, tells all in this video interview.
“Definitely try it, it’s amazing - it exceeded my expectations, and just being able to have that extra time to go and actually do what I wanna do, it’s been great.”
James Bieker, Investigations Technical Specialist at Washington County Sheriff’s Office (Special Investigations Division)
Redacting videos for FOIA and other requests
There’s a few things that come up when we’re doing video redaction. A lot of it is security. Being in law enforcement, a lot of that can’t go out to everybody and expose people that are in our jail facilities, for example.
Being able to cut through to see what we can show the news or the media - the system has got to be fast. Of course, it’s usually that day or the next that they want it.
A lot of the video redaction solutions we’ve used before, they’re just so slow. We have to pretty much go frame by frame because it doesn’t know what it’s following - all it knows is that little spot on the screen is blocked, and as the person is walking away or moving, it doesn’t follow them.
Because of that, you can have a 2 minute video and you’re putting hours into it.
Using Secure Redact
“Secure Redact was perfect, it was so quick and it really helped us in a crunch."
Allowing me to temporarily use your programme and demo it to see how it worked, if it was exactly what we were looking for without having to go and purchase it and then hoping it works - was fantastic.
"The software was actually pretty good at being able to follow even the distortion in some of the 360 views."
I was actually impressed that it knew that’s a person, there’s their face and it knew to unredact it when they actually turned away.
Saving valuable time and improving productivity
“Time is the biggest thing, I think with us in law enforcement.“
At least with me - I’m one of those guys, I don’t like to sit at a desk forever (it drives me crazy), I like to go out and do things, and be busy.
"Secure Redact cut down hours, I mean hours - to not have to sit at a desk for 6-8 hours trying to do 2 minutes worth of redacting, that’s allowing me now to go back to doing my regular job so they’re not paying me overtime to have to try and get this done. "
I had my doubts, of course, you know it’s a computer programme and it’s following someone - but it did really well.