UW News

February 26, 2004

UW Police find that video in squad cars helps make their jobs easier

About 16 months after installing video cameras in all its marked cars, University Police officers say the money spent on this new technology has proven to be a good investment.

With a small camera mounted on the front windows of all six police cars automatically capturing everything that happens nearby, all day, every day, University Police have been able to add more certainty to their jobs and the cases prosecutors bring to court.

Lt. Rich Lewis likes the way the cameras clarify some situations like suspected drunken driving incidents. “There’s really no debating what happened, be it good or bad. The video shows just what the officer saw,” Lewis says. “Overall it makes our cases stronger.”

The lieutenant adds that the system, which cost the University about $100,000, has also saved some money because of the clarity of the video information. A few times, after seeing a video of the incident, the defense attorney has encouraged his or her client to settle instead of going through the expensive process of a trial.

Another recent situation when the cameras helped out occurred when a person who was being stopped for a traffic violation refused to pull over and drove away before he could be ticketed, but not before he and his car were videotaped. He was later arrested by another police department and when University Police shared their video information, the person was also charged for eluding police.

Now that every officer has completed training with the new equipment and they feel comfortable with the technology, their feedback has been enthusiastic, according to Lewis. “At least three officers have come to me and showed appreciation that the camera was in the car because it showed what has taken place,” he says.

The cameras were installed for a num-ber of reasons, including gathering infor-mation to use at trials, and protecting the rights of citizens and of the police officers by keeping a record of their interactions.

In addition to the video camera, which can swivel and zoom to capture different kinds of information at the scene, from license plate numbers to sobriety tests, each police car is equipped with a laptop computer, a digital voice recorder and a hard drive to store up to four months of video and audio information. The voice and video recordings are synched with the computer software and stored together in a graphical interface that makes it easy for officers to replay or record video by date and time.

The technology used in University Police cars — both the hardware and the software — was developed by a local company, SecureEye, which has many ties to the UW. Company President Jim Masten earned three degrees from the University and was a researcher in the Applied Physics Laboratory from 1976 to 1984. Masten says all of the company’s core team are former University employees and graduates.

They came up with the idea for the technology in the mid-1990s, thinking it would make sense to translate the things they’ve learned from using technology for defense applications to helping police officers. “We looked at the local policemen riding in the car and realized that there really hadn’t been any new technology since the radio,” Matsen says.

They had to wait until after 2000, when computer technology caught up with their ideas, to make SecureEye’s products a reality. After a period of further development and initial marketing, The University Police department was one of the company’s first customers.

Matsen’s hope for the University Police is that the system will evolve to helping the officers in other ways and that the computers in their cars make their jobs easier and less time consuming. “They will spend more time helping people and less time upstairs typing on the computer,” Matsen says.

His dream jibes with the dreams of the leaders of the University Police department, according to Assistant Chief Ray Wittmier, who believes video equipment will someday be used by all police depart-ments. “I would not be surprised if within the next five to 10 years that every police agency has video equipment in their vehicles as standard equipment just like you’d have a siren and light bar,” he says.

Wittmier would be interested in seeing the University Police department become a testing ground for new ideas, but that kind of future would require financial investment from companies exploring new technologies. “I’d like to see us develop a facility here that is so cutting edge that others will come here to see what we do,” Wittmier says.