7 ms·

What's the timeframe on the video being handled, given to police, etc. Do the police have the authority to take any video files recorded by a vehicle involved i

What's the timeframe on the video being handled, given to police, etc. Do the police have the authority to take any video files recorded by a vehicle involved in an auto accident? Is a warrant needed? It's more likely that the police opened an investigation, and as part of the investigation, handed over dashcam footage. We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident.

lhorie 8y ago
IIRC the video was released by the police the next day > We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident. From my own experience, the police will take dashcam video evidence the first chance they get because it's the best data they can get their hands on while on a scene. Source: I had interactions with the police on two separate occasions (once when my dashcam happened to record a car break-in taking place as I was driving into a parking lot, and once when some guy road raged me). On the second occasion, they were reviewing the video less than 15 minutes from the time of the incident and had the whole thing resolved within the hour. Besides, as I said earlier, Uber itself is making a statement admitting it was at fault, and the NTSB investigation has way more forensic data than the crappy quality dashcam video police released, so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative.
- drcode 8y ago
  > so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative. Well, at the end of the day this is all involves a strong element of PR & perceptions, so regardless of the quality of other data, it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video be in the initial stories about this accident.
  - lhorie 8y ago
    > it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video Why? As soon as the video came out, the first thing people (correctly) pointed out was that the dynamic range of the dashcam was crap. Besides, everyone knows that self-driving cars are essentially giant self-telemetry collection machines, so one would have to be either extremely short-sighted or incredibly stupid to think they would be able to get away with a "well it was too dark!" lie after the NTSB got on the case and the media caught wind of the shenanigans. Also, as I said in my linked comment above, the logistics of actually attempting to tamper the video would be borderline comical. It's much more plausible that the dashcam dynamic range was in fact crap and that the police officers at the scene were smart enough to figure out to just pop off the SD card off the dashcam.
    - drcode 8y ago
      I agree with this, Occam's Razor suggests your description of events is more likely.
    - drcode 8y ago
      To be fair, I doubt the police just "popped the SD card out of dashcam"... more likely Uber had managers (and lawyers) at the scene within a short time window and Uber had time for very careful deliberations before handing anything to the NTSB (though as you say it's still more likely the got they raw dashcam footage instead of an altered video) Here is the more likely order of events: 1. Driver calls supervisor 2. Supervisor redirects call to senior Uber lawyer 3. Uber lawyer says "Don't do anything until we get to the scene. Be polite to police but tell them to wait until our legal team arrives" 4. Legal team at scene, talks with uber CEO (and senior lawyers over phone) then after an hour or so tells NTSB they will hand over footage after engineer arrives and extracts the dashcam footage 5. Engineer hands dashcam footage to lawyers, who then hand it to NTSB
      - lhorie 8y ago
        That still sounds pretty farfetched IMHO. You're basically saying that both the supervisor and a senior lawyer were on call at 10:30pm on some random day _and_ were immediately available upon request _and_ knew exactly what to do and who to call next _and_ the police were just twiddling their thumbs the whole time, despite there being a dead body on the scene. And lawyers/engineers can teleport from SF to Tempe somehow since there's no way they would've been able to fly in with that short notice so late at night. If anything, I'd imagine that the police would be blocking access to the accident area and the car, especially to an alleged Uber employee trying to muck around with evidence without a government-sanctioned body overseeing forensics. If I were to make a guess, I'd imagine it would've gone like this: - "omg, I just hit someone" - driver sees victim on the ground, panics and calls 911 - police and paramedics arrive - police interviews driver, gets the account of the story, checks paperwork, get driver's information - driver tries calling supervisor to escalate the issue (potentially unsuccessfully) - paramedics declare victim dead, driver gets upset, body eventually is taken away while police tries to calm the driver - tow truck arrives, takes car into police custody - next morning, local police investigators look at the car in the impound, find the dashcam and look at the video. Uber ATG wakes up to the bad news and scrambles to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. The engineering team is still nowhere near Arizona and probably too busy wading through TBs of sensor/AI data to even remember there was a cheap dashcam installed in the car. - Police releases a statement (w/ the dashcam video) - NTSB gets involved in the investigation and gets in contact with Uber to understand how to acquire forensic data out of the SDV's databases.

lhorie 8y ago

IIRC the video was released by the police the next day > We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident. From my own experience, the police will take dashcam video evidence the first chance they get because it's the best data they can get their hands on while on a scene. Source: I had interactions with the police on two separate occasions (once when my dashcam happened to record a car break-in taking place as I was driving into a parking lot, and once when some guy road raged me). On the second occasion, they were reviewing the video less than 15 minutes from the time of the incident and had the whole thing resolved within the hour. Besides, as I said earlier, Uber itself is making a statement admitting it was at fault, and the NTSB investigation has way more forensic data than the crappy quality dashcam video police released, so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative.

drcode 8y ago
> so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative. Well, at the end of the day this is all involves a strong element of PR & perceptions, so regardless of the quality of other data, it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video be in the initial stories about this accident.
- lhorie 8y ago
  > it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video Why? As soon as the video came out, the first thing people (correctly) pointed out was that the dynamic range of the dashcam was crap. Besides, everyone knows that self-driving cars are essentially giant self-telemetry collection machines, so one would have to be either extremely short-sighted or incredibly stupid to think they would be able to get away with a "well it was too dark!" lie after the NTSB got on the case and the media caught wind of the shenanigans. Also, as I said in my linked comment above, the logistics of actually attempting to tamper the video would be borderline comical. It's much more plausible that the dashcam dynamic range was in fact crap and that the police officers at the scene were smart enough to figure out to just pop off the SD card off the dashcam.
  - drcode 8y ago
    I agree with this, Occam's Razor suggests your description of events is more likely.
  - drcode 8y ago
    To be fair, I doubt the police just "popped the SD card out of dashcam"... more likely Uber had managers (and lawyers) at the scene within a short time window and Uber had time for very careful deliberations before handing anything to the NTSB (though as you say it's still more likely the got they raw dashcam footage instead of an altered video) Here is the more likely order of events: 1. Driver calls supervisor 2. Supervisor redirects call to senior Uber lawyer 3. Uber lawyer says "Don't do anything until we get to the scene. Be polite to police but tell them to wait until our legal team arrives" 4. Legal team at scene, talks with uber CEO (and senior lawyers over phone) then after an hour or so tells NTSB they will hand over footage after engineer arrives and extracts the dashcam footage 5. Engineer hands dashcam footage to lawyers, who then hand it to NTSB
    - lhorie 8y ago
      That still sounds pretty farfetched IMHO. You're basically saying that both the supervisor and a senior lawyer were on call at 10:30pm on some random day _and_ were immediately available upon request _and_ knew exactly what to do and who to call next _and_ the police were just twiddling their thumbs the whole time, despite there being a dead body on the scene. And lawyers/engineers can teleport from SF to Tempe somehow since there's no way they would've been able to fly in with that short notice so late at night. If anything, I'd imagine that the police would be blocking access to the accident area and the car, especially to an alleged Uber employee trying to muck around with evidence without a government-sanctioned body overseeing forensics. If I were to make a guess, I'd imagine it would've gone like this: - "omg, I just hit someone" - driver sees victim on the ground, panics and calls 911 - police and paramedics arrive - police interviews driver, gets the account of the story, checks paperwork, get driver's information - driver tries calling supervisor to escalate the issue (potentially unsuccessfully) - paramedics declare victim dead, driver gets upset, body eventually is taken away while police tries to calm the driver - tow truck arrives, takes car into police custody - next morning, local police investigators look at the car in the impound, find the dashcam and look at the video. Uber ATG wakes up to the bad news and scrambles to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. The engineering team is still nowhere near Arizona and probably too busy wading through TBs of sensor/AI data to even remember there was a cheap dashcam installed in the car. - Police releases a statement (w/ the dashcam video) - NTSB gets involved in the investigation and gets in contact with Uber to understand how to acquire forensic data out of the SDV's databases.