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This just in from Ars Technica, "Claire McCaskill, the Democratic senator from Missouri, says police departments nationwide should require their officers wear body cameras in order to qualify for the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding they receive each year." You read that right, the Senator wants to tie federal money that police agencies currently receive to compliance with this

@spreadys pointed out an interesting article about the role CCTV has in fighting crime. The best part of the article are the comments at the bottom. The best one, "I'm sorry, but bragging about 500 arrests from 41,000 incidents is truly pathetic. It just shows how useless CCTV is. If the incidents took place in front of a copper, the arrest rate would have been worth crowing about. People aren't

If you're in the NYC area, the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law will play host on Sept. 10th to the WSF's Science of Justice discussion/presentation. They use the events in Ferguson to put the spotlight on "forensics," but miss an important point: none of the presenters are experts in digital video or small device forensics. It's a given, these days, that there will be two elements to every

The online site, bellingcat, recently announced results from their crowdsourced investigation into the location of the Islamic State's training site in Iraq. It's an interesting study in the use of publicly available sources to identify the location depicted in photos through visual content analysis, as opposed to relying on metadata. Check it out here.

Many folks use Adobe's Acrobat to share reports, images, and video. Often times, we're asked to extract the images from a PDF file for use elsewhere. Depending on the downsampling settings, the images in a PDF might not work well outside of the document. Here's how to check the resolution of the image within the PDF file. If you have Acrobat Pro, you can use the Object Inspector in Output

I hope you're ready to retrieve DME from another type of recorder. GM recently announced that the new Corvette will feature on-board video/data recording as part of a performance data recorder and navigation system package that is a $1,795 add-on to the $53,995 base price of the Corvette. In the future, when investigation a burglary/theft from a motor vehicle, or a vehicle theft, you may be

Bad news. "FourMatch has been discontinued and is no longer available for purchase. Existing customers will be provided with free updates to the signature database through the end of 2014." Fourandsix directs you to their Izitru web site. But LE folks aren't going to upload their evidence to the cloud. So that's it. Good news. Amped Software's Authenticate is still going strong.

If your PDF files are huge, and you can't figure out why, there's an easy way to check. Using Acrobat Pro, the easiest way to determine why your files are so big (and possibly reduce the file size) is to open the PDF Optimizer by clicking on File>Save As Other>Optimized PDF. At the top right of the PDF Optimizer dialog click on the Audit space usage button. Which brings up this dialog box.

Adobe's Jeffrey Tranberry answers the following questions in this blog post: Where are my settings & workspaces? Where are my presets? Where are my custom panels? Where are my 3rd party plug-ins? Why do I now have two versions of Photoshop installed? Check out the answers here.

In case you weren't paying attention to the news over the last few days ... The news media is pushing this meme - #RecordThePolice. If your agency hasn't seen it yet, it will. Citizen submitted video and images of police activity can help investigations ... and they can harm investigations if they've been edited to change the context of the scene. Recently, many videos surfaced showing an

New in Adobe Camera Raw is the ability to activate LAB Color readouts in the Histogram. Simply Control-click (Mac) | Right-click (Win) within the Histogram to enable LAB Color readouts, even when the Workflow Options are set to another color space (such as Adobe RGB). I know it's a bit nerdy, but more options are always cool.

The latest version of Amped Software's FIVE has just been released. The additions to the program will be quite helpful. New tool: Export Video renders the current video using FFmpeg, Video For Windows, DirectShow, QuickTime New tool: Export PDF saves all the current video frames on a PDF file User interface: improved behavior of modifiers when setting parameters values; now the step is 10 times

If you started your LE career in 1994, the tech world has changed dramatically. All of your tech was in separate devices. Video cameras were just video cameras. Tablets were just tablets. Etc. Now, it's all in your phone - or your suspect's phone. Just 10 years ago, you found storage devices containing around 128mb. Now, you're finding them to be 128gb - and bigger. How are you and your

One of the many vendors making a big splash at this year's NaTIA conference is MediaSolv. MediaSolv has teamed up with Amped Software to introduce it's First Responder product. Here's how it works: 1. Retrieve the original video from the DVR (Flash/thumb drive, DVD, CD, etc.) 2. Because the format is proprietary, it cannot be played with Windows Media Player and Windows does not recognize