The Vancouver, British Columbia, Police Department was similarly inundated by citizen-recorded photos and video after the city’s 2011 Stanley Cup riot — 5,000 hours of video alone had to be examined during the investigation. This job was too big for the department to handle. Luckily its personnel were aided by a team of experts assembled by the Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association (LEVA).
In both instances, the citizen-supplied evidence was attached to a cloud of extensive IT resources and manpower demands, and all of this potential evidence had to be collected, accessed and stored somewhere. This can make citizen-sourced visual evidence an unmanageable nightmare for most police departments.
Fortunately the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) — together with CitizenGlobal and Amazon Web Services — has developed a free, cloud-based photo/video collection, management and storage system called LEEDIR. Short for Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository, LEEDIR provides police departments with an easy-to-activate, third-party managed destination for the public to submit photos and video without tying up departmental staff and IT resources. LEEDIR is free, but certain conditions apply.
The caveat: To qualify for free use of LEEDIR, the incident being investigated must involve at least 5,000 people, include multiple jurisdictions and/or cover an area of five square miles. Qualifying incidents could be a concert, sporting event or protest that got out of hand, resulting in human and/or property damage. (CitizenGlobal also offers the service on a subscription basis for single-jurisdiction and similar smaller incidents.)
“With LEEDIR, all a department has to do is sign up to get password-controlled access,” said LASD’s Cmdr. Scott Edson, the officer who created the LEEDIR program. “It makes sense to sign up before an incident happens so that you are ready to use the service if you need it. You will also have time to watch a free training and certification webinar to get the most out of the platform.”
How LEEDIR Works
When an event occurs that could benefit from citizen-sourced visual evidence, the police department logs onto the LEEDIR website to file a request form for a LEEDIR page. “Riots are a good choice, because the public is as motivated as the police are to get the perpetrators,” said Edson. Once activated, this page is an upload point that collects digital photos and video, plus any text information the public wants to provide.After the LEEDIR page is active, the police department publicizes the Web page’s address and lets citizens upload their evidence independently. The LEEDIR service, managed by CitizenGlobal personnel, handles it all.
“To make public submissions as easy as possible, LEEDIR offers iPhone and Android apps that citizens can download for free to their smartphones,” Edson said. “If the person so chooses, they can upload their photos, videos and text anonymously, or leave their name and contact information if they want to.” Potential evidence can also be uploaded via Web-enabled tablets and computers.
As soon as the public starts to upload evidence to LEEDIR, the police department’s analysts can sign into their account to view, sort and review the content. (Any alterations to the submitted data are performed on copies; the original data files are always left untouched to ensure admissibility in court.) This data can be shared with all investigators across multiple agencies as desired, using the password-protected LEEDIR site as a secure distribution and sharing channel. Additional information and testimony can also be requested from LEEDIR contributors who provided contact information.
During this process, the police department is free to download whatever photos, videos and texts it deems relevant and save them to its own servers. Once this is done and the online investigation is closed, the department can tell LEEDIR to clear the data, or decide to pay a monthly fee to keep it stored on LEEDIR’s cloud.
It’s also possible to set up a LEEDIR page before an event takes place, just in case something goes wrong. The Cincinnati Police Department did so in advance of the July 14, 2015, Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
“This Digital Information Sharing Tool is in place should a critical incident occur during the All-Star game festivities,” said the posting on LEEDIR’s website. “Citizens will be requested to please upload and send any photos, videos or information to the Cincinnati Police Department using the methods below. We appreciate your assistance in helping keep the events and city safe!”
Results to Date
The LASD spearheaded the push for cloud-based visual evidence collection and storage in a bid to head off the kind of evidence-handling challenges that plagued the Boston Marathon bombing. “We wanted to benefit from citizen-provided visual evidence without investing a lot of manpower and IT resources to manage and maintain it,” Edson said. “This led us to the private sector to help develop what became LEEDIR. Fortunately, once they understood what we wanted to do and why, CitizenGlobal agreed to provide the software and operational part of the project, and Amazon Web Services offered cloud storage for free.”The LASD has not yet had occasion to use LEEDIR, save for a recent multi-agency exercise that “went very smoothly,” Edson said. But the Keene, N.H., Police Department has put LEEDIR to the test. On Oct. 18, 2014, the town’s annual pumpkin festival turned into a riot, with drunken revellers overturning a car, tearing down streetlamps, and otherwise causing property damage and mayhem outside Keene State College.
In response to the riot, the Keene Police launched a LEEDIR page to gather witnesses’ photos, videos and text about that night’s events. “We received close to 500 pieces of digital evidence from the public,” said Keene Police Detective Joel Chidester. “This evidence helped us make 25 post-riot arrests, in addition to the 84 arrests we made at the scene that night.”
The citizen-provided content showed evidence of criminal acts and helped Keene Police positively identify the perpetrators. “Thanks to the content we got from LEEDIR, every single one of the arrests made on the basis of this evidence resulted in a conviction,” Chidester said. “This was a great tool for us, and one that every police department should take advantage of.”
However, setting up a LEEDIR page is not a guarantee of nailing criminals. The Santa Barbara County, Calif., Sheriff’s Office turned to LEEDIR while investigating a booze-fueled college party that turned into a riot in Isla Vista in April 2014. “We set up an initial LEEDIR account to assist with this case, but it did not result in lead development,” said the department’s Lt. Craig Bonner.
Bonner does not discount the potential usefulness of LEEDIR, it was simply unable to generate additional leads in this case. This happens: In some instances, the public may not record incident videos that could be useful to police, or if they do, they may not be willing to submit them to investigators. That said, given that LEEDIR cost the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office nothing to use, there was no loss associated with trying it.
It is the fact that LEEDIR is free, combined with the public’s general propensity to record and share photos and videos at incident scenes, and the difficulties police departments have trying to manage such evidence on their own, that makes this service worth testing. At the very least, there is no loss in doing so, as the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office found. At most, it can make a real difference in identifying and convicting felons, as the Keene Police did by using LEEDIR after the pumpkin festival riot.
Today, LEEDIR continues to evolve. It can now search social media sites for posted video and pictures in proximity to an incident, and process and store that information automatically. Even SD cards from cameras and hard drives from local businesses’ surveillance cameras can be uploaded to a LEEDIR event Web page.
“We need all the tools we can get to do our jobs effectively and protect the public as best as we can,” said Edson. “LEEDIR is one such tool: It can make a difference in collecting, managing and storing citizen-sourced visual evidence.
