Castle Shannon’s police department is the first in Pennsylvania to take advantage of new technology that simplifies the process of reviewing body camera footage.
Since March, the department has been using Truleo’s cloud service that uses artificial intelligence to break down the footage into a searchable database. In a press release, the company called it, “baseball card stats for cops.”
“Truleo’s metrics enable command staff to identify both high levels of professionalism as well as risky officer interactions. Truleo’s quality assurance technology originated on Wall Street and is now being used by police departments across the U.S. to gain unprecedented insights into everyday police-civilian interactions,” the release states.
Castle Shannon police Chief Ken Truver said the software has made the job of sifting through footage much simpler.
Truver explained that the manual process for reviewing the footage and flagging incidents as potential evidence is time consuming, and not fully comprehensive.
“There is a lot of video that is not flagged, that we’re not looking at,” Truver said.
With Truleo, Truver said they are able to set up filters to have the software look for particular keywords. According to Truleo, their technology can recognize speech and analyze the language used by an officer to classify incidents. All of the data is stored on the cloud.
Truver said it could be a way to show more positive interactions between the police and the community.
“The vast majority of police-citizen interactions are good. You hear about the few anomalies that are bad,” Truver said.
Castle Shannon police are making use of the service for free, as Truver sits on the product advisory board and is offering feedback to improve the technology.
Truver sits on the boards of numerous law enforcement groups, and is the president of the FBI National Academy Associates. He first learned of Truleo’s product at an FBI National Academy conference in Georgia earlier this year, where he met CEO Anthony Tassone.
“I have a large network, a lot of contacts and a lot of exposure to new technology and programs,” Truver said.
According to Truver, Truleo’s software has been working as advertised.
“The technology is fascinating and exciting. It’s doing exactly what it should be doing,” Truver said.
