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Monday, May 12, 2008

Evidence Ready CCTV Standard Launched in the UK

From the Forensic Video Analysis Group, London, UK:

"The Evidence Ready CCTV standards licensing programme has been designed to help the police retrieve evidence quickly and easily by providing them with all the information they need to export and view the evidence."

Click here to read more about this interesting development. Pay particular attention to the specifications in the agreement. The first questions that I asked myself is, "how can 'Export of recorded footage without the appropriate playback software onto Compact disc (CD) and/or digital versatile disc (DVD) and/or universal serial bus (USB) device' be considered evidence ready?" Won't you need the player to play back the footage in it's native form?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It looks like you caught a typo (I hope it's a typo) in the document.

The best part may be more awareness on the part of installers and business owners of what law enforcement needs from their systems.

Jim Hoerricks, PhD said...

I hope that it's a typo as well. Many of the UK forums were not at all kind in their review of this program.

Anonymous said...

Hello all,
Just wanted to explain were we are coming from with this program. We tried to introduce true standards for CCTV digital recorders over the last year but met great resistance from most of the manufacturers. The main reason was cost, if we set a baseline standard for DVR’s as we are all aware most DVR's wouldn't meet it. That we mean most of the manufacturers would lose money so without an act of government it wasn't/isn't going to happen.
So we took a different view and looked at what was needed most. After consultation with the Police, Courts and the information commissioner it was decided that if we could provide all the information needed to quickly and efficient retrieve and review footage when an incident occurred then this would be a huge help. So we designed evidence ready as a way of getting the manufacturers to provide the information needed. Each registered DVR is given a URN that should be displayed on it, so when an officer/tech attends to retrieve the evidence they can access a central database and be provided with all the relevant information. The database can only be accessed by the Police.

I hope that helps explain it better, any comments or questions feel free to contact to me.

James Davies at contact@fvag.co.uk