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Helicopter Footage Reveals State Trooper Surveillance Capabilities

163 points by colinprince 3y ago

supportengineer 3y ago
Unbelievably sharp images.
runnerup 3y ago
Was impressed with the professionalism from this angle. They seemed to focus on charging people with only the correct crimes and communicating processes to ensure those arrested wouldn’t lose their personal effects. Were there abuses of LRAD or tear gas etc on the ground during this NSA arrest or was it done correctly and humanely at all levels?
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  Yes the article seems very "anti police" but this shows all doing a very good job.
- runnerup 3y ago
  *mass arrest
- ricardobeat 3y ago
  A lot of those “correctly charged” crimes would not happen at all, if the police did not aggressively corral and use riot control tactics on peaceful protests… it’s crazy that this is lawful.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    The crime was blocking the highway. If there were no police at all, that crime still would have been committed. I'm all for civil disobedience but at least if I'm not mistaken, when Dr. King organized so many marches and sit-ins he guided his followers to peacefully allow themselves to be arrested -- overflowing the jails and courts was an intentional part of the civil disobedience. He himself was arrested many times. That peaceful action made media coverage of events like the police violence in Selma, Alabama more impactful than they would be otherwise. I grew up in a "violent leftist" city, which was a major hub for the Weathermen and various bombings of law enforcement buildings during the era of "Days of Rage", but the general advice for attending protests/marches in the early 2000's was "bring a check in your pocket to fill out for bail", not "run away from the police and attempt to avoid getting arrested" or "attack the police and burn down the police stations".
    - matt_morgan 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - reaperman 3y ago
        Maybe it should be, but your assertion is incorrect. It is not currently a crime to create spaces where people using motor vehicles have a statutory right-of-way over people not using motor vehicles. Cars themselves have very few rights. Property has its own rights only in very esoteric court cases like United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins[0] Personally I'd rather live in a society in which most common roads reserve default right-of-way for pedestrians and bicycles, but also in which some spaces are reserved for motor vehicles, particularly limited-access highways away from city centers. I'd also like plenty of public transportation both locally and inter-regionally, to eliminate the "need" to own personal motor vehicles. I just keep separate what I want from what is reality. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately_64,695_Pounds_of_Shark_Fins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
      - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
        [flagged]
        FredPret 3y ago
        Having lived in European, African, Canadian, and American cities, I can tell you the ones in North America are about ten times more comfortable.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        For the benefit of people, cars and trucks should have right of way over pedestrians on limited access highways. Just as trains should on intercity train tracks and aircraft on runways.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - 3y ago
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - darkclouds 3y ago
    A lot of those protests wouldnt happen if democracy, law, diet and the media didnt divide people. Apathy is a powerful tool.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Diet? How does diet divide people?
      - JohnMakin 3y ago
        it's the toxins /s
      - darkclouds 3y ago
        Look at the quality of food you can afford and not afford. Cheaper foods tend to be fattier geared up for manual workers. You'll have a shorter lifespan. Tap water is just pus, then you have the high levels of chemicals in them. The best water you can drink is deionised water, the stuff used for vehicle batteries and steam irons, and then add in the best chemicals to top up your mineral content. Chlorides are better than other forms like gluconate or sulphates which become sulfuric acid when exposed to the hydrochloric acid in the gastric juices, which then destroys tissues in the body oh so slowly. Iron chloride for example generates the least amount of reactive oxygen species, and is also the most labile, able to switch between state more easily than other iron supplements. Its the best form of iron you can get, show me a supplement that uses it! Chlorides also work better in the most acidic parts of the body. I really do question the medical experts, legislators and food industry. So if you know what chemicals will do what in the body, through the diet, you can alter the personality's and health of the population. One way to do that is through food legislation. Global manufacturers can also play their part as well.
  - pc86 3y ago
    Shining a laser into an aircraft cockpit immediately makes it a non-peaceful protest.
    - hiatus 3y ago
      So the actions of a single individual can change the nature of the entire protest? That line of thinking seems to incentivize the use of agent provocateurs.
      - pc86 3y ago
        Who better to make sure the protest is peaceful than the folks doing the protesting?
        93po 3y ago
        Who better to destroy constitutional rights than a plain clothes cop with a $15 laser?
        pc86 3y ago
        So what's the answer? 1A doesn't protect non-peaceful protests. There's no court in the world that would classify lasers used in this manner as peaceful. "Oh it's just some pig doing it, not the real protestors" is such an intellectually lazy response and most of the time it's false anyway. If you want to have a peaceful protest I will be the first one to support it whether I agree with the end goal or not. But the people running these things have an obligation to see that they remain peaceful.
        93po 3y ago
        The answer is protest is an invaluable tool for a functioning democracy and if the government has the power to explicitly state which square footage of a city that people have the right to protest in, then we’ve lost the right to protest. Police forces use unconstitutional and unlawful force all the time. Should we disband the police every time that happens? Should we force all police to leave the area in the first instance of that happening?
- dylan604 3y ago
  >They seemed to focus on charging people with only the correct crimes and communicating processes to ensure those arrested wouldn’t lose their personal effects. This was less for the protesters convenience as it was all about not making the officers on the ground deal with that level of pain in the ass logistics. They were told to search all belongings, but unless anything was found to just tag the bag and send them on to I'm guessing booking. During booking in a much more controlled environment, they could take their time and do the normal processing of personal items. It's a triaging decision, not a polite to the protestors decisions
ablation 3y ago
I genuinely had no idea the video surveillance tech was that good. The detail of the people on the roof in particular was astounding to me. It makes me wonder just what tech is like being used in the echelons (ahem) above regular law enforcement?
- rasz 3y ago
  Russian helicopter on Snake Island https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d32EKhjUCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d32EKhjUCU was recorded from couple kilometers away, same clarity.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    There is something really wrong with that video at the exact moment the helicopter gets hit. If it was just the image that's one thing, but the overlaid UI blurs and zooms as well.
    - justinsaccount 3y ago
      Looks like a cell phone recording of a monitor. It's also slightly askew, you can tell the horizontal lines are not quite horizontal. The bright explosion likely confused the autofocus, or maybe the person holding the camera jumped.
      - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
        That might explain it!
        d1sxeyes 3y ago
        No, I think you're right to be suspicious of this .If you step forward frame by frame from 18s, (pause, then use '.' and ','), you can see that the loss of focus occurred before the helicopter was hit. By watching the bluer bits of the image, you can see that it seems that the camera was very quickly (almost immediately it seems?) centred on the cliffs to the bottom right, then recentred a few frames later but at an angle (probably rotated around 10 degrees anticlockwise). The next few frames are the actual explosion, where the offset angle seems to remain consistent, and then, interestingly, the HUD is almost perfectly recentered at 0 where it remains consistently Through 19s, again the person recording this from the screen seems to either zoom or move the camera very quickly towards the screen, before immediately resetting. It's clear that this weirdness is being introduced by the person recording the video (not from the drone itself) because the HUD also moves and blurs (you can see what it looks like when the drone camera pans throughout second 23/24. Note the HUD remaining static and clear). Second 26 is also interesting, because you can see static bright spots suddenly seem to begin moving. However, I think this is actually a rotating lens cover on the drone camera which is introducing these artifacts. You can also see that immediately after this, the HUD display is different. A different number (I believe it's 80, based on a frame at 37s) is displayed, and the centre of the HUD is a crosshair rather than a small circle. I believe this new lens is slightly shorter, and is supposed to give a wider view of the explosion that just happened. If you advance slowly through second 37-38, you see the camera 'zoom out' from 80 to 402, and it seems both the drone and the person filming this's cameras needed to recalibrate their exposure settings. It's not quite enough for me to say it's definitely suspicious, but those movements at the 18-19s mark are definitely a bit odd. It could potentially be artifacts of YouTube automatically stabilising the video, but there's definitely something unnatural here.
odiroot 3y ago
I'm not surprised about the video capabilities. We've already had U2 spy plane decades ago, taking detailed photos from near-space altitude. I'm shocked how terrible quality the audio comms are.
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
- hugh-avherald 3y ago
  Can't help but think that the static was included in post-editing to give the effect of 'raw' footage (like the visual static).
- digdugdirk 3y ago
  Also leads to some interesting possibilities - given that this occured in November in Minneapolis, there seems like there would be opportunities to manipulate the infrared camera. Off the top of my head - extra hot point heat sources could "blow out" the image, or insulated umbrellas/barriers could obfuscate where or how many protesters are present. Could anyone with infrared camera experience weigh in?
  - myself248 3y ago
    While I haven't used the equipment here, I own a number of consumer- and low-end professional-grade thermal imagers. Resolution and NETD differ, but I expect the overall behaviors are similar. They're remarkably good at not letting point sources blow out the image. That's a very important performance parameter, since often you're not concerned with the hottest point, but the parts immediately adjacent, so you can see how heat is flowing through the device being inspected. A lot of investment and IP goes into this -- since the hot spot _will_ heat the imaging array, and on older imagers it would cause streaking if moved, modern ones do extensive thermal modeling of the array itself to try to cancel out this effect, all baked into FPGAs so it can be done in real-time. They're very good at it. A very naïve implementation may have auto-scaling for the color palette, in which case a hot-spot would skew the palette and make cooler stuff hard to distinguish, but that would be a total amateur mistake. Setting the palette to highlight human skin temperature is like step 1 of any such operation. Insulated umbrellas, or just big aluminized-mylar space-blankets, would definitely play havoc with the image. An AI people-counter trained on the image would probably lose its marbles, but a human looking at it would quickly understand what's going on and make some educated guesses. It's very hard to hide your thermal signature for very long, which is why thermal imaging is so important in warfighting.
londons_explore 3y ago
I actually think this is pretty 'meh'... There is no way they could recognise faces from that footage. They might be able to track people, but if someone disappears behind a car or building for just a few seconds, then in court they could argue that they weren't the same person - and that any crimes caught on camera before walking behind a building must have been someone else.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  > if someone disappears behind a car or building for just a few seconds, then in court they could argue that they weren't the same person They could argue it, sure. But if that's their only argument they would almost certainly lose because judges and jurors understand the concept of object permanence. Lose sight for ten minutes with not enough detail to verify whether it's the same person? Reasonable. Hide behind a car for 30 seconds, with footage showing no one else coming or going? Good luck convincing anyone that it was the other guy hiding behind that car.
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
Weird article, a protest can be peaceful, but dont you need a permission? "Authorities ended up arresting and charging then-19-year-old college student, Amina McCaskill. Prosecutors charged her with felony, second-degree riot armed with a dangerous weapon, the weapon being the laser." Yes? A laser can damage eyes and blind people. If shined into a heli it is VERY dangerous.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  You don’t need permission to protest, but you do generally need one to march. In this case, since the protesters were physically obstructing a freeway, on which pedestrians are usually legally banned, a march permit would never have been issued. I suspect that’s part of the police rationale behind not giving orders to disperse. You might end up with a riotous crowd semi-spontaneously on a city street, so reading the Riot Act and ordering them to leave is appropriate. Everyone in this protest already broke the law by walking onto a freeway. Agreed that the laser user should face stiff penalties. Federal ones. You want to protest violently, that’s one thing. You want to endanger people who just happen to live within a mile of you by blinding pilots? That should hurt a lot more than spending a night or two in jail.
  - scohesc 3y ago
    Genuinely asking - don't modern helicopters have the ability to hover or go on autopilot in some capacity, or am I (likely) very _very_ ignorant when it comes to helicopters? I agree with you that the person shining lasers into helicopters and blinding pilots causing potential permanent eye damage should face stiffer penalties.
    - 93po 3y ago
      Doesn’t really matter, you never know when flying when you’ll need to react to an emergency situation, which you very much need eyesight for. If you lost vision during an engine out in a helicopter you’d surely die
    - 20after4 3y ago
throw0101b 3y ago
On the tactic of kettling: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling * https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21282509/george-floyd-protests-kettling-new-york-nypd https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21282509/george-floyd-protests-...
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - darkclouds 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
      [flagged]
- expertentipp 3y ago
  The best one is kettling by the police without any exit, while appealing through the megaphone to the entrapped crowd to disperse.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    I've been to a lot of protests but I think the worst one I've ever seen was summer 2020 chicago. They declared an immediate curfew and simultaneously raised the bridges to downtown and shut down transit. The police were so incredibly violent after that, they had total control and very little restraint. And there was local news or police media team ready to catch every act of desperation from the protestors. But very little of the state violence made it to the news. They were singling out people filming, smashing phones, arresting anyone nearby. I remember stumbling into a corner and falling to the street and seeing it already covered in blood and mucus and teeth, and thinking "that's more teeth than one person has in their head wtf happened here." And then having to come on the internet every day since and hear about the "rioters" and looters and lawlessness and shit.
nine_zeros 3y ago
Reminds of the satellite footage of a site in Iraq/Afghanistan before a drone attack.
specialist 3y ago
I expected some kind of "friend or foe" system. Surveillance continues to improve as number of unsolved (and uninvestigated) crimes goes up. Coincidence?
- reaperman 3y ago
  Maybe as there's more evidence it's harder to convict innocent people to pad the metrics? I have no idea, but there's a lot of possible causes for correlations like this.
  - bequanna 3y ago
    > Maybe as there's more evidence it's harder to convict innocent people to pad the metrics? More likely, decreased policing in the more dangerous neighborhoods has let to more unsolved crimes.
- notakio 3y ago
  I was surprised to not see IR beacons on LEO units. In military operations with air surveillance, individuals/vehicles often use IR flashing and IR reflection to mark themselves to air assets. If MPD has the money for 1) an air surveillance unit (this cost is not trivial; SFPD, for example, hasn't had their own aviation section in decades due to the cost), and 2) decent thermal optics on said surveillance unit, then it surprises me they don't spring for sub-$100 IR beacons to distinguish their own personnel from everyone else, and enable rudimentary "blue force tracking", as it were.
icegreentea2 3y ago
The video showing MPD shitting on their community engagement officer actually seems more interesting - and from my perspective more problematic.
- hnarn 3y ago
  > shitting on their community engagement officer I have a hard time visualizing what this would mean figuratively, so now I kind of wonder if you meant this literally.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    Sorry, I used 'shitting on' figuratively to mean 'disrespecting' and 'denigrating'. In the linked bodycam video, the MPD officers involved banter about 'needing to spit' when the community engagement officer goes by, and also appear to be partaking in a game where anyone who actually says the officer's name (Dubuc) is subject to mock punishment. Honestly it's pretty juvenile. It's possible that this is part of a healthy culture somehow (like, I can jump through enough mental hoops to make that happen), but it's almost certainly not part of healthy culture.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Paging Styropyro . . Just joking. That would be irresponsible. That kind of thing doesn't happen until the crowd's missed a day or two of its meals. Or had a few relatives murdered. Besides, some of that kid's lasers might conceivably bring down a helo, depending on sights and of course <All_The_Wacky_Things_That_Affect_DEWs/>
75central 3y ago
I found this footage with its overlay from the Dallas Police to be interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXK5mx8NBf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXK5mx8NBf4
- svag 3y ago
  It seems that this, https://esg.de/en/blog/a/156/2019-02-14-esg-bietet-small-mission-display-f%C3%BCr-hubschrauber-und-Missionsflugzeuge https://esg.de/en/blog/a/156/2019-02-14-esg-bietet-small-mis... might be the software that is being used there.
SenAnder 3y ago
Is this the "going dark" problem we're constantly warned about?
71a54xd 3y ago
They were flashing an aircraft with a laser - none of this is surprising... That said, I loathe the police in my area because they basically don't do anything. Dangerous drivers and motorcycles are more common than ever, my neighbor in a nice neighborhood was car jacked at gun point and police were annoyed she called. The worst example was police taking 2hrs to show up after a friend was hit by a drunk driver... by the time they bratholized the drunk driver she was already under the limit. For me, I'm far more worried about license plate scanners on police cruisers than FLIRs on helicopters (they've had this tech since 2006).
_sys49152 3y ago
for those complaining about the video quality, lets see the still/flash photography photos & their quality that helicopters take during flight as well. theres your detail.
tamimio 3y ago
That’s nothing to what other capabilities are used in protests by law enforcement, for example, if you fly any consumer RC drone, most likely they have the AeroScope running to capture the drones AND the pilots’ locations, it was actually used in Canada in one of the big protests happened before. However, if you build your own drone and you don’t fly it over RC link, it is a lot harder to track.

163 points by colinprince 3y ago

Unbelievably sharp images.

Was impressed with the professionalism from this angle. They seemed to focus on charging people with only the correct crimes and communicating processes to ensure those arrested wouldn’t lose their personal effects. Were there abuses of LRAD or tear gas etc on the ground during this NSA arrest or was it done correctly and humanely at all levels?

Unfrozen0688 3y ago
Yes the article seems very "anti police" but this shows all doing a very good job.
runnerup 3y ago
*mass arrest
ricardobeat 3y ago
A lot of those “correctly charged” crimes would not happen at all, if the police did not aggressively corral and use riot control tactics on peaceful protests… it’s crazy that this is lawful.
- reaperman 3y ago
  The crime was blocking the highway. If there were no police at all, that crime still would have been committed. I'm all for civil disobedience but at least if I'm not mistaken, when Dr. King organized so many marches and sit-ins he guided his followers to peacefully allow themselves to be arrested -- overflowing the jails and courts was an intentional part of the civil disobedience. He himself was arrested many times. That peaceful action made media coverage of events like the police violence in Selma, Alabama more impactful than they would be otherwise. I grew up in a "violent leftist" city, which was a major hub for the Weathermen and various bombings of law enforcement buildings during the era of "Days of Rage", but the general advice for attending protests/marches in the early 2000's was "bring a check in your pocket to fill out for bail", not "run away from the police and attempt to avoid getting arrested" or "attack the police and burn down the police stations".
  - matt_morgan 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - reaperman 3y ago
      Maybe it should be, but your assertion is incorrect. It is not currently a crime to create spaces where people using motor vehicles have a statutory right-of-way over people not using motor vehicles. Cars themselves have very few rights. Property has its own rights only in very esoteric court cases like United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins[0] Personally I'd rather live in a society in which most common roads reserve default right-of-way for pedestrians and bicycles, but also in which some spaces are reserved for motor vehicles, particularly limited-access highways away from city centers. I'd also like plenty of public transportation both locally and inter-regionally, to eliminate the "need" to own personal motor vehicles. I just keep separate what I want from what is reality. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately_64,695_Pounds_of_Shark_Fins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Approximately...
    - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - FredPret 3y ago
        Having lived in European, African, Canadian, and American cities, I can tell you the ones in North America are about ten times more comfortable.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      For the benefit of people, cars and trucks should have right of way over pedestrians on limited access highways. Just as trains should on intercity train tracks and aircraft on runways.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - 3y ago
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  [flagged]
- darkclouds 3y ago
  A lot of those protests wouldnt happen if democracy, law, diet and the media didnt divide people. Apathy is a powerful tool.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Diet? How does diet divide people?
    - JohnMakin 3y ago
      it's the toxins /s
    - darkclouds 3y ago
      Look at the quality of food you can afford and not afford. Cheaper foods tend to be fattier geared up for manual workers. You'll have a shorter lifespan. Tap water is just pus, then you have the high levels of chemicals in them. The best water you can drink is deionised water, the stuff used for vehicle batteries and steam irons, and then add in the best chemicals to top up your mineral content. Chlorides are better than other forms like gluconate or sulphates which become sulfuric acid when exposed to the hydrochloric acid in the gastric juices, which then destroys tissues in the body oh so slowly. Iron chloride for example generates the least amount of reactive oxygen species, and is also the most labile, able to switch between state more easily than other iron supplements. Its the best form of iron you can get, show me a supplement that uses it! Chlorides also work better in the most acidic parts of the body. I really do question the medical experts, legislators and food industry. So if you know what chemicals will do what in the body, through the diet, you can alter the personality's and health of the population. One way to do that is through food legislation. Global manufacturers can also play their part as well.
- pc86 3y ago
  Shining a laser into an aircraft cockpit immediately makes it a non-peaceful protest.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    So the actions of a single individual can change the nature of the entire protest? That line of thinking seems to incentivize the use of agent provocateurs.
    - pc86 3y ago
      Who better to make sure the protest is peaceful than the folks doing the protesting?
      - 93po 3y ago
        Who better to destroy constitutional rights than a plain clothes cop with a $15 laser?
        pc86 3y ago
        So what's the answer? 1A doesn't protect non-peaceful protests. There's no court in the world that would classify lasers used in this manner as peaceful. "Oh it's just some pig doing it, not the real protestors" is such an intellectually lazy response and most of the time it's false anyway. If you want to have a peaceful protest I will be the first one to support it whether I agree with the end goal or not. But the people running these things have an obligation to see that they remain peaceful.
        93po 3y ago
        The answer is protest is an invaluable tool for a functioning democracy and if the government has the power to explicitly state which square footage of a city that people have the right to protest in, then we’ve lost the right to protest. Police forces use unconstitutional and unlawful force all the time. Should we disband the police every time that happens? Should we force all police to leave the area in the first instance of that happening?
dylan604 3y ago
>They seemed to focus on charging people with only the correct crimes and communicating processes to ensure those arrested wouldn’t lose their personal effects. This was less for the protesters convenience as it was all about not making the officers on the ground deal with that level of pain in the ass logistics. They were told to search all belongings, but unless anything was found to just tag the bag and send them on to I'm guessing booking. During booking in a much more controlled environment, they could take their time and do the normal processing of personal items. It's a triaging decision, not a polite to the protestors decisions

ablation 3y ago

I genuinely had no idea the video surveillance tech was that good. The detail of the people on the roof in particular was astounding to me. It makes me wonder just what tech is like being used in the echelons (ahem) above regular law enforcement?

rasz 3y ago
Russian helicopter on Snake Island https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d32EKhjUCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6d32EKhjUCU was recorded from couple kilometers away, same clarity.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  There is something really wrong with that video at the exact moment the helicopter gets hit. If it was just the image that's one thing, but the overlaid UI blurs and zooms as well.
  - justinsaccount 3y ago
    Looks like a cell phone recording of a monitor. It's also slightly askew, you can tell the horizontal lines are not quite horizontal. The bright explosion likely confused the autofocus, or maybe the person holding the camera jumped.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      That might explain it!
      - d1sxeyes 3y ago
        No, I think you're right to be suspicious of this .If you step forward frame by frame from 18s, (pause, then use '.' and ','), you can see that the loss of focus occurred before the helicopter was hit. By watching the bluer bits of the image, you can see that it seems that the camera was very quickly (almost immediately it seems?) centred on the cliffs to the bottom right, then recentred a few frames later but at an angle (probably rotated around 10 degrees anticlockwise). The next few frames are the actual explosion, where the offset angle seems to remain consistent, and then, interestingly, the HUD is almost perfectly recentered at 0 where it remains consistently Through 19s, again the person recording this from the screen seems to either zoom or move the camera very quickly towards the screen, before immediately resetting. It's clear that this weirdness is being introduced by the person recording the video (not from the drone itself) because the HUD also moves and blurs (you can see what it looks like when the drone camera pans throughout second 23/24. Note the HUD remaining static and clear). Second 26 is also interesting, because you can see static bright spots suddenly seem to begin moving. However, I think this is actually a rotating lens cover on the drone camera which is introducing these artifacts. You can also see that immediately after this, the HUD display is different. A different number (I believe it's 80, based on a frame at 37s) is displayed, and the centre of the HUD is a crosshair rather than a small circle. I believe this new lens is slightly shorter, and is supposed to give a wider view of the explosion that just happened. If you advance slowly through second 37-38, you see the camera 'zoom out' from 80 to 402, and it seems both the drone and the person filming this's cameras needed to recalibrate their exposure settings. It's not quite enough for me to say it's definitely suspicious, but those movements at the 18-19s mark are definitely a bit odd. It could potentially be artifacts of YouTube automatically stabilising the video, but there's definitely something unnatural here.

odiroot 3y ago

I'm not surprised about the video capabilities. We've already had U2 spy plane decades ago, taking detailed photos from near-space altitude. I'm shocked how terrible quality the audio comms are.

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
hugh-avherald 3y ago
Can't help but think that the static was included in post-editing to give the effect of 'raw' footage (like the visual static).
digdugdirk 3y ago
Also leads to some interesting possibilities - given that this occured in November in Minneapolis, there seems like there would be opportunities to manipulate the infrared camera. Off the top of my head - extra hot point heat sources could "blow out" the image, or insulated umbrellas/barriers could obfuscate where or how many protesters are present. Could anyone with infrared camera experience weigh in?
- myself248 3y ago
  While I haven't used the equipment here, I own a number of consumer- and low-end professional-grade thermal imagers. Resolution and NETD differ, but I expect the overall behaviors are similar. They're remarkably good at not letting point sources blow out the image. That's a very important performance parameter, since often you're not concerned with the hottest point, but the parts immediately adjacent, so you can see how heat is flowing through the device being inspected. A lot of investment and IP goes into this -- since the hot spot _will_ heat the imaging array, and on older imagers it would cause streaking if moved, modern ones do extensive thermal modeling of the array itself to try to cancel out this effect, all baked into FPGAs so it can be done in real-time. They're very good at it. A very naïve implementation may have auto-scaling for the color palette, in which case a hot-spot would skew the palette and make cooler stuff hard to distinguish, but that would be a total amateur mistake. Setting the palette to highlight human skin temperature is like step 1 of any such operation. Insulated umbrellas, or just big aluminized-mylar space-blankets, would definitely play havoc with the image. An AI people-counter trained on the image would probably lose its marbles, but a human looking at it would quickly understand what's going on and make some educated guesses. It's very hard to hide your thermal signature for very long, which is why thermal imaging is so important in warfighting.

londons_explore 3y ago

I actually think this is pretty 'meh'... There is no way they could recognise faces from that footage. They might be able to track people, but if someone disappears behind a car or building for just a few seconds, then in court they could argue that they weren't the same person - and that any crimes caught on camera before walking behind a building must have been someone else.

probably_wrong 3y ago
> if someone disappears behind a car or building for just a few seconds, then in court they could argue that they weren't the same person They could argue it, sure. But if that's their only argument they would almost certainly lose because judges and jurors understand the concept of object permanence. Lose sight for ten minutes with not enough detail to verify whether it's the same person? Reasonable. Hide behind a car for 30 seconds, with footage showing no one else coming or going? Good luck convincing anyone that it was the other guy hiding behind that car.

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

Weird article, a protest can be peaceful, but dont you need a permission? "Authorities ended up arresting and charging then-19-year-old college student, Amina McCaskill. Prosecutors charged her with felony, second-degree riot armed with a dangerous weapon, the weapon being the laser." Yes? A laser can damage eyes and blind people. If shined into a heli it is VERY dangerous.

devilbunny 3y ago
You don’t need permission to protest, but you do generally need one to march. In this case, since the protesters were physically obstructing a freeway, on which pedestrians are usually legally banned, a march permit would never have been issued. I suspect that’s part of the police rationale behind not giving orders to disperse. You might end up with a riotous crowd semi-spontaneously on a city street, so reading the Riot Act and ordering them to leave is appropriate. Everyone in this protest already broke the law by walking onto a freeway. Agreed that the laser user should face stiff penalties. Federal ones. You want to protest violently, that’s one thing. You want to endanger people who just happen to live within a mile of you by blinding pilots? That should hurt a lot more than spending a night or two in jail.
- scohesc 3y ago
  Genuinely asking - don't modern helicopters have the ability to hover or go on autopilot in some capacity, or am I (likely) very _very_ ignorant when it comes to helicopters? I agree with you that the person shining lasers into helicopters and blinding pilots causing potential permanent eye damage should face stiffer penalties.
  - 93po 3y ago
    Doesn’t really matter, you never know when flying when you’ll need to react to an emergency situation, which you very much need eyesight for. If you lost vision during an engine out in a helicopter you’d surely die
  - 20after4 3y ago

throw0101b 3y ago

On the tactic of kettling: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettling * https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21282509/george-floyd-protests-kettling-new-york-nypd https://www.vox.com/2020/6/6/21282509/george-floyd-protests-...

Unfrozen0688 3y ago
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- darkclouds 3y ago
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expertentipp 3y ago
The best one is kettling by the police without any exit, while appealing through the megaphone to the entrapped crowd to disperse.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  I've been to a lot of protests but I think the worst one I've ever seen was summer 2020 chicago. They declared an immediate curfew and simultaneously raised the bridges to downtown and shut down transit. The police were so incredibly violent after that, they had total control and very little restraint. And there was local news or police media team ready to catch every act of desperation from the protestors. But very little of the state violence made it to the news. They were singling out people filming, smashing phones, arresting anyone nearby. I remember stumbling into a corner and falling to the street and seeing it already covered in blood and mucus and teeth, and thinking "that's more teeth than one person has in their head wtf happened here." And then having to come on the internet every day since and hear about the "rioters" and looters and lawlessness and shit.

nine_zeros 3y ago

Reminds of the satellite footage of a site in Iraq/Afghanistan before a drone attack.

specialist 3y ago

I expected some kind of "friend or foe" system. Surveillance continues to improve as number of unsolved (and uninvestigated) crimes goes up. Coincidence?

reaperman 3y ago
Maybe as there's more evidence it's harder to convict innocent people to pad the metrics? I have no idea, but there's a lot of possible causes for correlations like this.
- bequanna 3y ago
  > Maybe as there's more evidence it's harder to convict innocent people to pad the metrics? More likely, decreased policing in the more dangerous neighborhoods has let to more unsolved crimes.
notakio 3y ago
I was surprised to not see IR beacons on LEO units. In military operations with air surveillance, individuals/vehicles often use IR flashing and IR reflection to mark themselves to air assets. If MPD has the money for 1) an air surveillance unit (this cost is not trivial; SFPD, for example, hasn't had their own aviation section in decades due to the cost), and 2) decent thermal optics on said surveillance unit, then it surprises me they don't spring for sub-$100 IR beacons to distinguish their own personnel from everyone else, and enable rudimentary "blue force tracking", as it were.

icegreentea2 3y ago

The video showing MPD shitting on their community engagement officer actually seems more interesting - and from my perspective more problematic.

hnarn 3y ago
> shitting on their community engagement officer I have a hard time visualizing what this would mean figuratively, so now I kind of wonder if you meant this literally.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Sorry, I used 'shitting on' figuratively to mean 'disrespecting' and 'denigrating'. In the linked bodycam video, the MPD officers involved banter about 'needing to spit' when the community engagement officer goes by, and also appear to be partaking in a game where anyone who actually says the officer's name (Dubuc) is subject to mock punishment. Honestly it's pretty juvenile. It's possible that this is part of a healthy culture somehow (like, I can jump through enough mental hoops to make that happen), but it's almost certainly not part of healthy culture.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

Paging Styropyro . . Just joking. That would be irresponsible. That kind of thing doesn't happen until the crowd's missed a day or two of its meals. Or had a few relatives murdered. Besides, some of that kid's lasers might conceivably bring down a helo, depending on sights and of course <All_The_Wacky_Things_That_Affect_DEWs/>

75central 3y ago

I found this footage with its overlay from the Dallas Police to be interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXK5mx8NBf4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXK5mx8NBf4

svag 3y ago
It seems that this, https://esg.de/en/blog/a/156/2019-02-14-esg-bietet-small-mission-display-f%C3%BCr-hubschrauber-und-Missionsflugzeuge https://esg.de/en/blog/a/156/2019-02-14-esg-bietet-small-mis... might be the software that is being used there.

SenAnder 3y ago

Is this the "going dark" problem we're constantly warned about?

71a54xd 3y ago

They were flashing an aircraft with a laser - none of this is surprising... That said, I loathe the police in my area because they basically don't do anything. Dangerous drivers and motorcycles are more common than ever, my neighbor in a nice neighborhood was car jacked at gun point and police were annoyed she called. The worst example was police taking 2hrs to show up after a friend was hit by a drunk driver... by the time they bratholized the drunk driver she was already under the limit. For me, I'm far more worried about license plate scanners on police cruisers than FLIRs on helicopters (they've had this tech since 2006).

_sys49152 3y ago

for those complaining about the video quality, lets see the still/flash photography photos & their quality that helicopters take during flight as well. theres your detail.

tamimio 3y ago

That’s nothing to what other capabilities are used in protests by law enforcement, for example, if you fly any consumer RC drone, most likely they have the AeroScope running to capture the drones AND the pilots’ locations, it was actually used in Canada in one of the big protests happened before. However, if you build your own drone and you don’t fly it over RC link, it is a lot harder to track.