Mind the Communication Gap

I received a panicked email and phone call last week that can easily be summarized by the graphic above. Yes, there are still vendors selling to the police services that don't understand or accommodate the agencies needs or schedules.

As most in government service know, often the ability to spend money on tools and training happens within a short window of time. Such a window had opened for this person and they reached out to a company in response to a bit of marketing on new redaction functionality in a particular piece of software.

In the email that was shared with me, the requestor made it clear that they wanted to redact footage from body worn cameras. A trial code was shared for the company's tool. The requestor eagerly downloaded and installed the software, then assembled his supervisors and stakeholders to evaluate the new software. That's when the problems began.

Redacting the visual information was relatively straight forward, but cumbersome. However, he couldn't figure out how to redact the audio portion of the file. He reached out to the company's rep. Unfortunately, it was late on Friday in California. He received no reply from the company's rep, who'd likely gone home for the weekend. Thus, having previously communicated with me on technology issues, he reached out hoping that I'd still be around.

I let him know that to the best of my knowledge, none of Amped SRL's products redact audio. Yes, they'd promised audio redaction in FIVE at the 2016 LEVA conference. But, it's never materialized. As it's not been developed, it's quite likely that there is no audio redaction functionality in Replay.

He received a note from the sales rep on Monday. It informed him that the redaction functionality was built around a CCTV use case, and as such, did not concern itself with audio. The order taker that responded to the inquiry could have saved the requestor a ton of time and stress by simply reading the request - redaction of BWC footage - adding a helpful disclaimer in the reply that the tech doesn't redact audio.

Redaction remains a huge issue in California. Agencies are looking for a quick fix, but no easy solutions have presented themselves. The marketing from Amped seemed to provide a glimmer of hope to the requestor. But those hopes were dashed when the advice from the order taker, three days late, was that there is no single redaction solution - which isn't entirely true.

As I informed the requestor on Friday evening, the Adobe Creative Suite has all the necessary tools to perform a standards-compliant redaction for California's new laws. The automatic tracking in PremierePro is the best currently available. Plus, at $52.99/month, the cost savings is substantial vs. FIVE or Replay.

Given that the requestor had until 1700 PDT to spend the allocated funds, not receiving a reply until the following Monday was not an option. Thankfully, I was able to answer his questions and get him on the right path. Next stop for him is my redaction class, featuring the Adobe tools (link).

Have a great day friends.