Their method actually does make sense, you just have to remember they aren’t cops to solve (boring) crimes like petty theft. Why get it done as efficiently as possible when you can milk it for hours of overtime? 12 hours of footage means 6+ hours of overtime even watching it at x2 speed, and it’s the kind of thing you can basically have going on in the background. Cops being willfully ignorant for their own benefit makes sense to me
You know what’s even better than milking it for 6hrs of OT? Saying its “to hard” to the victim, going home and then lying about doing 6hrs of OT and getting paid anyway.
Cops lie about OT systemically. Its absolutely rampant. The only consequence they ever get is either a few hrs suspension without pay or fired, and most states are happy to hire them next door immediately so they can do it again.
Yeah, seriously. What is even the context of this? We have no idea. The cops might have been like “We need a warrant to look at that footage you idiot.”
Whoever owns the camera presumably has an interest in reducing/solving crime in the area (why else have cameras?), so they would likely be happy to make the footage available to police if asked nicely, with no warrant required.
Yeah, in general, but not necessarily in that circumstance. A lot of time talking to tech people (I’m a softwar engineer) they can can be smug about this while leaving out important context.
No, I’ve been in this situation as a victim. My bike was stolen and they said it would take hours to search the CCTV. I told them about binary search, they didn’t understand.
You can’t convince people to do their job with logic when they just don’t want to do their job. After minorities, the thing cops hate most is doing their job.
I assume he doesn’t have access to it. He just knows there’s a camera pointing at the place where his bike was stolen, and that the police have access to the footage.
It might also be a matter of getting a directive from their management not the care, because there’s not enough cops to go around for the ‘important’ stuff.
They don’t want to waste their limited time for simple property theft, which is ironic considering that’s what police are supposed to be doing (stopping theft).
The answer would be then to hire more police, but unfortunately that would mean higher taxes for the citizenry, and that seems to be a hard glass ceiling.
No, the police just don’t want to do any work. In my hometown you can’t get the police to do shit unless you are a black man who “fits the description” or “smells like weee” then they will gladly try to make your death look as much your fault as possible.
The police exists to protect the status quo. Try overthrowing any immoral law or legally but immoral behavior and you’ll see how efficiently they move about.
Come on, don’t disparage our hard-working Boys in blue. Without police who’s going to come to your house to take notes about the crime that you have sufficient evidence to prove, and even have a likely suspect for, and then never follow up?
I’m a little surprised the police didn’t already know about that method. Seems like they’d encounter enough CCTV footage that’d it’d be standard training.
I once again overestimate the training levels of the police.
What they really want to say is “We aren’t interested in investigating your personal theft. Things get stolen all the time and we really can’t be bothered. You are not important to us.”
But they can’t say that, so they instead throw out some excuse that puts the onus back on the other person.
And Detective Conan Doyle O’Brien really did just let his bro fuck around and watch porn and even bring a stripper into the station during footage reviewing hours. Of course, Stuart was quite shocked to hear he was not invited to the stag do later that weekend
I dunno. “Don’t attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity.” I can totally believe that the average police officer has not thought this through. “5 hours of footage! We don’t have 5 hours to look for one bike.”
It’s a somewhat narrow situation. You won’t always have the object of interest in plain view of a camera. What if it’s behind a door? Well now you do have to scrub through all the footage
IT consulting pro-tip: Customers would rather pay for your time and expertise, than be made to feel stupid that they didn’t think of something so simple themselves.
After working in desktop support for a year after college, I realized that people just wanted their problem solved and to not feel frustrated. That realization made my job immensely easier because I pivoted from copying a file in 30 seconds and walking away to talking to them a little bit and letting them feel good after we were done. My ticket closing speed slowed down a little but people felt better and I consistently got positive feedback.
Dude same here. I usually say stuff along the lines of ‘yea it took me forever the first time to figure it out’ or ‘it’s a common issue that a lot of people have, I’ll get it sorted in a sec for you no problem’. Make it seem like they’re not stupid, regardless of the truth and then fix it, keeps em happy and more willing to cooperate with you as well.
I also talk through what I’m doing and if they show interest I’ll teach them so they can fix it in the future, ‘ah I’ve seen this before, took me like a hour to figure it out on my computer, for me it was a chrome update that broke how downloaded files open. Here let me right click the file, and go to open with, we hit Adobe pdf and check the always open with this program button, that should do it let’s test it out. OK seems like its good to go. Let me know if you have any more issues’. If they don’t show interest then it’s no problem.
Are you my kindred spirit!? :P Thats almost exactly what I do too!
My favourite is when someone apologies for not knowing something or having dumb questions. Apart from “there is never a dumb question” because there usually isn’t, I typically respond with “if everyone already knew how to do everything, I’d be out of a job” which always seems to go down well.
Same story here, actually. I cut my teeth on internet telephony (modems) support for an ISP. People would call up furious about not being able to connect. I learned that chatting people up during a long Windows reboot did a lot to humanize their struggle and get them to calm down and loosen up. First few times were organic, then I started looking for pretenses to do this, just to bring the temperature down for the rest of the call.
Call centers tell you to empathize but that’s not something you can teach. You can either do it or you can’t. So they give those terrible scripts, and then some of them require you to speak the scripted lines, even when you know all it does is piss the caller off.
No hears that scripted pablum at the start of call and thinks it’s genuine. No one. “I’m sorry to hear your having issues sir, but I’ll be happy to assist you.” genuinely comes off condescending at this point. They know you know it’s scripted, they know you know the representative has to say it, but they make them do it anyway.
Here’s what I found doing ISP call center work, and it worked virtually every single time: imply through tone and pointed comments you’re as frustrated as the called with how shitty the service and the hardware is. They’re never prepared for it, it always catches their anger off guard.
Don’t outright say “Yeah, Cox is absolute dog shit, and that POS gateway we make you pay for isn’t worth the cost of the the technician we’re sending out to ‘fix’ it.” You’ll get in trouble for that.
But if you’re careful and creative, you can make them appreciate you think that
Eh, it’s less intuitive than you might think, as someone who already knows how to do it.
I once had to explain this process to a software engineer who was quite senior to me. The guy wasn’t any idiot, he was a pretty competent engineer, he just didn’t know this trick.
The cops might even already know how to do it, they just don’t want to, because they’re cops.
Just yesterday, I was helping this manager set up a new system of ticket line (the kind where you get a ticket number and wait for it to be called in a panel). He complained that they didn’t have a proper printer just for these tickets, so he made the tickets in excel and printed them. To the right of the number, someone would mark the service, from a list of 6.
“Why not use a single letter prefix and print different piles of passwords? (A01, A02, A03; B01, B02, etc)”
That’ll use too much paper. We’ll also need more tickets than before
“That will use less paper, you can print 2 tickets using the same space. Also, the amount of tickets always depends on the number of people that show up, but you’ll have a better idea of which service is being needed each day”
Mr manager didn’t like the idea and moved on to another problem.
I do not get why it would work in that case. I assume the scenario is someone with a bike coming, doing theft, then leaving with the same bike.
Therefore there will be a period without bike, then a period with bike, then a period without bike again.
Let’s assume there is no bike on the particular moment viewed. How do you know whether it occured before or after the theft? If you make the wrong decision, you get stuck on an endless binary search… Unless you take note at each timestamp where you made the decision, draw a tree of timestamps, and go back the tree if your search is fruitless but that’s much more complicated than what this post says.
You’re making this way more complicated than it actually is. The guy definitely can give estimates for when he parked the bike and when he found out that it was stolen. It’s not that complicated.
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