The following transcript was generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Everyone, welcome to the first Amped podcast. I’m Lucy Carey-Shields, one of the forensic analysts here at Amped Software. Joining me today is my esteemed colleague, Blake.
Blake Sawyer: Hey, good to have you. Good to see you.
Lucy Carey-Shields: We’re doing this for the first time. We’re going to be talking today about CCTV nightmares — things like chain of custody, and things that can go wrong. Blake and I will talk a bit about our experiences. Blake, do you want to start by introducing who you are and where you came from?
Blake Sawyer: Sure, absolutely. There’s a deeper story, but — I’m Blake Sawyer, the operations director for the US, and I’ve been here since 2019. Before that, I worked for the Plano Police Department in Plano, Texas, collecting video, processing video, and trying to help our agency do better when it came to what to do with video. What about yourself?
Lucy Carey-Shields: Oh, well, it’s not as fancy as that. In the UK, I was part of law enforcement for a long time, from about 2010, but not in anything digital. I got into this by accident. I started as a frontline officer — what we call a special constable. So I was a volunteer; I didn’t get paid for it. You can make of that what you will. Some may call me an idiot.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Then I thought, “This computer forensics thing seems quite interesting. I might try that.” Cut to the future: I did a degree in computer forensics, and now I’m here, still doing some law enforcement work. But mostly, Monday to Wednesday, you can find me answering technical support questions for Amped Software.
Blake Sawyer: That’s actually how I met you — when I worked at the police department. Lucy was answering my support questions.
Lucy Carey-Shields: I can’t remember that! Okay. Do you want to start with some questions? We’ve got some prepared. We’re just going to try to have a conversation — we don’t want it to be too technical. We want it to be about our experiences and some of the pitfalls with CCTV in particular. We’ve both dealt with it quite heavily in our careers, and we still work with it at Amped, supporting you guys and hopefully making the software the best it can be. Go on, Blake — do you want to start?
Blake Sawyer: My first question was: what made you get into video forensics? But I guess you answered that in your intro.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Yeah, it was accidental. My degree is in computer forensics, so computers and mobile phones are my day-to-day bread and butter. When I applied for my first digital forensics job, they said, “We have three computers over here that have the mobile phone software, and three computers over here that have the CCTV stuff. The mobile computers are all full, so do you want to just sit and do a bit of CCTV for a bit?” Cut to six years later, I was still doing it, and accidentally became not too bad at it.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Then I met someone called David Spreadborough, who sort of showed me the way. He’s not here today, but he’s one of our esteemed colleagues — one of the best analysts in the UK. He taught me most of what I know, so if I make any mistakes, it’s his fault. Not really. What about you?
Blake Sawyer: I have a different background. I came from the world of audio and video production — I spent time in recording studios and doing live audio and video production. A friend at the police department said they were looking for somebody to do video work, and I said I could do that. The department wasn’t quite sure what to do with that role.
Blake Sawyer: They put me in the crime scene unit, but part of my responsibilities was also making sure microphones were working — making sure the chief’s conferences happened the way they were supposed to, and that when the PIO, the public information officer, was talking, his microphones were working. That was what I did for the first little while. They sent me to LEVA training — the Law Enforcement Video Association — so I could eventually clarify video if that ever came up.
Blake Sawyer: About a year into that, we had a girl who went missing, so we tracked down where she went. They had me go out and help with collections at that point. We collected about a terabyte of video, processed it all the way through, and tracked her throughout the night to the last place she was.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Wow.
Blake Sawyer: The next morning we followed his car, as he was three hours late for work. He stopped at a gas station, and — as one normally does — he took the squeegee and wiped down the trunk of his car. Once we were able to see that, they brought him in. They ended up bringing him up on kidnapping charges, and he got life in prison for that. Afterwards they found her body, so if it ever comes back up, that was a homicide.
Blake Sawyer: So that went from me doing a little bit of video to that being pretty much my job from then on. We went from two or three video requests a month to about 30 or 40 overnight. Now that department’s up to two or three hundred video requests a month.
Lucy Carey-Shields: So you could say you built that place, really — accidentally. That’s your legacy.
Blake Sawyer: Right?
Lucy Carey-Shields: Accidentally becoming an expert — that should be the title of the podcast, this one in particular.
Blake Sawyer: The Accidental Experts.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Yes. Being thrown into a trial by fire. Going back to that case, because it sounds super interesting — were there any lessons you learned from that? Anything with regard to chain of custody that stood out and that you can tell us about?
Blake Sawyer: There were tons of lessons along the way — things they teach in LEVA, but that really became foundational as we got going. For example, we went to a neighborhood where our suspect lived, and there were five or six houses that all had cameras, but the times were all different, so we had to figure out the offsets.
Blake Sawyer: At one of the homes, this would probably show up as a mistake. We went to the house, and the guy said his cameras weren’t working. The detective left, then said, “Hey, Blake, could you come over and look at it with us?” We went back to look, and in that time, the guy had accidentally reformatted the system and deleted all the video that was on there.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Really?
Blake Sawyer: Yep. That would have been a really helpful clue, but in the end we had enough other video that it was fine. Another lesson: whenever you see something on the video and the system is working, document everything and make sure you don’t disconnect anything. In one case, we were at a car wash. The suspect brought his car in so we could swab it and examine it, but before he brought it in, he had it detailed so it would be as clean as possible.
Blake Sawyer: They had video of him at the car wash, but the owner of the car wash noticed the time was off by a few hours. So he reset the time in between when they watched the video and when we went to retrieve it. By resetting the time, it deleted the video and reformatted the system.
Lucy Carey-Shields: No way. Jeez.
Blake Sawyer: So there were lots of little things we learned that first time that really helped throughout the rest. Document your times. If you see the video, don’t leave. Those types of things.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Brilliant. In particular, I wanted to ask about continuity and chain of custody, which I always think can be overlooked with digital data because it’s not as tangible. I go back to my own experience as a police officer in uniform, with boots and belt kit on, on the ground seizing drugs or a weapon. That’s very tangible evidence.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Whereas digital data always feels a bit ambiguous, and I find it can be mishandled. I’ve done it. I remember being given some CCTV from a supermarket in the UK and just going, “Okay, what’s that? It’s on a CD. Do I just give it to the video unit now? Great.” In terms of chain of custody and keeping that continuity, are there any pitfalls that should be avoided, or any tips you know of?
Blake Sawyer: One of the biggest things, especially these days when most of your recoveries come off a flash drive or USB drive — every single time we’d take a flash drive out to the scene, we’d copy just that one incident from one location onto the flash drive. Then we could hash that, which gives it a digital fingerprint, so we have the start of a chain of custody right there.
Blake Sawyer: When we brought it back, we could copy that onto a CD or DVD, or put it up on our server — however you store your evidence — but now you have that fingerprint from the time you retrieved it. That helps start the chain of custody. And that helps on your side too, because you work in a lab. How do you maintain chain of custody once it leaves the field and comes to you?
Lucy Carey-Shields: Especially with mobile phone forensics, which is my primary work — that’s a nightmare. If you think CCTV’s bad, mobile devices are updating every single day.
Blake Sawyer: And they follow the tail.
Lucy Carey-Shields: The number of times I’ve spoken to frontline police officers who’ve gone, “Oh, I’ve just gone through this guy’s phone.” It’s like, “Okay — you’ve literally just changed data.” In the UK, and I can only really speak for the UK, we have what’s called the ACPO principles — the Association of Chief Police Officers. It doesn’t exist anymore, but the principles are still the same. The core of that is you shouldn’t change data.
Blake Sawyer: Shouldn’t change data.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Shouldn’t change data. The other principle is that everything should be documented. So, as long as you don’t change data and you document it. Another is that if you have to change data, you should be competent enough to do so. And the final principle, of the four, is that the senior investigating officer is in charge of all these principles. Unfortunately, a lot of the senior investigating officers I know go, “The what principles?” So we tend to be educating them — which we should be doing. They should be asking the digital experts, “How do I handle this data?”
Lucy Carey-Shields: When I get a phone call from an officer at a scene who asks, “Look, I’ve got four million digital devices, a computer, a Ring doorbell camera, and there’s CCTV — what do I do?” I’m like, “Great. You’ve started by doing the first correct thing, which is phoning us.” So having those conversations with frontline staff from the get-go, and people not being afraid to ask questions, matters. People feel stupid — “Oh, I should know this.”
Lucy Carey-Shields: Modern policing is super difficult. They think, “I should know this. I can use a phone, so I should be able to do this.” It’s like, “No, this is advanced stuff. We have training courses and degrees in this subject area, so ask questions. There are no stupid questions.”
Blake Sawyer: That’s really helpful. Have you seen that it’s helpful? Or have they given you opportunities to speak to your agencies and say, “These are the types of questions you should ask”?
Lucy Carey-Shields: Nowadays, because we’re dealing with so much data — you talked about a terabyte before — that’s standard now. That was shocking for us back in the day, but now you have 256-gigabyte iPhones. Data is becoming abundant and very routine. We’re dealing with large amounts of data, and we’re still dealing with it, from my experience, slower than we should be. We haven’t really caught up to that stage.
Lucy Carey-Shields: So the more we ask these questions and raise awareness, the better — and it takes the pressure off a bit, because there’s a lot of pressure. It’s a pressure cooker when you’re dealing with that much data in a short timeframe. You have to traverse a 256-gigabyte iPhone for someone who’s in custody, and there’s a clock ticking. Or maybe you have a kidnap victim or a homicide. It’s super important to have these conversations and be honest about what you don’t know and what limitations you have with software, technology, and knowledge.
Blake Sawyer: When you talked about iPhones, it triggered something in my brain.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Okay — mine too, don’t worry.
Blake Sawyer: You talked about a 256-gigabyte iPhone. How do you handle chain of custody and evidence that’s maybe stored in a cloud?
Lucy Carey-Shields: Ooh, the cloud.
Blake Sawyer: That’s putting you on the spot, because it’s not in the questions.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Interesting buzzword. The cloud, from my experience, is volatile data, and there’s certain legislation you have to follow in order to access it. It’s a very gray, cloudy area —
Blake Sawyer: I see what you did there.
Lucy Carey-Shields: — to coin a phrase. We can deal with it, as long as you’re doing it in a proportionate, justified way, for a policing purpose, and so on. In the UK in particular, there’s legislation that covers you. Obviously, you don’t know what’s stored in the cloud, and you’ve got things like two-factor authentication and encrypted tokens that get in the way — particularly with Ring doorbells and cloud-stored video.
Lucy Carey-Shields: That’s super common now. I’ve got it in my home. It’s super useful for a user, but it’s a massive challenge for law enforcement. How is it in the US? I know in the UK we’re very restricted in what we can do with it, and it has to be signed off.
Blake Sawyer: It’s similar in the US. With cloud storage devices, or whenever you have to pull information from social media, you have to file legal process. You have to give a reason. You can’t just say, “I want to know all the things Lucy’s been browsing on YouTube.” You’ve got to say, “This is the reason,” and you’ve got to have a judge sign off on that. A lot of the time, it takes a bit of work to get that information back.
Blake Sawyer: Sometimes, in exigent circumstances — “I see the video, and I need that video right now” — the Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidence, SWGDE, recommends you get that information as quickly and as best you can, and then still file the legal process. So for your Ring camera, you’d go to the website and try to download the video. If you have consent, and you can get that person to say, “Can I have a copy of that?” — pull that video right there, and then still reach out to Ring and say, “We need that video so we have a confirmation: this is the version we got.”
Blake Sawyer: Sometimes, with Ring cameras, there are multiple ways to save the video, and each of those can change the video in different ways. It’s not proprietary — proprietary is a whole other thing — but it’s always good with CCTV to get as proprietary as possible. With Ring cameras, it’s similar in that you want to make sure you get the best version. That’s one of those steps you have to go through as well.
Lucy Carey-Shields: This is a good conversation. I feel like we’re doing really well.
Blake Sawyer: It’s not bad for our first try.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Not bad for our first one. I want to bring it back to proprietary CCTV, because you mentioned it — which is our favorite. We love it.
Blake Sawyer: We do. We have people that’s all they look at.
Lucy Carey-Shields: That’s all they do. What limitations or challenges have you discovered with proprietary CCTV DVRs in your experience — even legacy stuff? I still like talking about the whole VHS demuxing. That’s retro now, but I kind of still love it.
Blake Sawyer: I’ve never run into an analog case. I’ve never had to work off VHS tape, outside of some old police cars — they used to have a VHS tape that would record, so we had old traffic stops and old interviews that we’d have to digitize. But proprietary happens all the time, and it’s its own challenge. It is helpful for chain of custody, because if you save that proprietary video, nobody’s going to be able to change it and still make it playable inside the player.
Blake Sawyer: The other good thing is that it’s going to be your least-changed version. If you go to a Hikvision system and say, “I want to save the AVI version,” the AVI version may be a re-encoded version — it may change the video so it’s not the same anymore. But the more proprietary version — like Samsung, who use a .SEC — that version is just the bits as they were copied on the DVR, saved into a format that plays inside their software.
Blake Sawyer: So the trouble we have, and why we have a whole team that works on this, is taking that information, preserving the details, but then making a version that’s playable — so we can watch it, so the courts can watch it, so you can put it out to the public. That way, when there’s an incident, you don’t have the news broadcast people screen-recording your video and putting that out, saying, “Does anybody recognize this person?” — which is a video of a video of a video.
Lucy Carey-Shields: An inception of videos.
Blake Sawyer: It becomes an inception of videos.
Lucy Carey-Shields: That brings me back to my pre-Amped FIVE days, when I was using things like FFmpeg and free open-source software, which is great. But I had a cheat sheet of FFmpeg commands and I did not know what I was doing. I’d just type -f h264 and so on. What are the dangers of that? Our format technicians and developers talk about this all the time.
Lucy Carey-Shields: I think it’s super important to reiterate, because I didn’t know — I didn’t know what I was doing back then, and I think I still don’t really know. But I’m a bit more educated these days, to try to avoid -f h264 and so on, when something like FIVE can maybe do it more robustly.
Blake Sawyer: Absolutely. It is a playable version, so it helps make something that’s easier to play. The downside is that those proprietary systems have their own little bits and bobs — I think that’s the British term, bits and bobs.
Lucy Carey-Shields: I’m really proud of you.
Blake Sawyer: Because they have all that different information in there, if FFmpeg runs into one of those segments it doesn’t recognize, it says, “I’m just going to skip this until I find something else I recognize.” In the process, it can skip frames, or skip part of frames. It can lose the timing information.
Blake Sawyer: By bringing it into FIVE, what FIVE will do — the developers have set it up so it can parse out the data that’s non-video data, and either create a timestamp stream for it or clean the file — so it’s easier for that file to play, and you preserve all the frame information.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Makes sense.
Blake Sawyer: It’s a big help, for sure. I also used to do FFmpeg all the time. I actually helped on the SWGDE paper about FFmpeg.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Really? Tell us more about that.
Blake Sawyer: No, you don’t want to know more about that. It’s people arguing in a room for a week. It’s not exciting. It’s pretty much every hybrids meeting — which is the team we’re on, the hybrids team.
Lucy Carey-Shields: We call ourselves the hybrids because we’re a hybrid between someone very technical and someone with a human aspect. So we call ourselves the hybrids team — if that explains it to people out there.
Blake Sawyer: It reminds me — I have a screenshot saved on my computer from the first time I testified. It was that case I was talking about earlier. The local news agencies were all live-tweeting my testimony. There’s this one comment that my wife screenshotted and posted publicly, saying, “This is my life.” It said, “Specialist Sawyer is wafting into nerd talk. The prosecutor is trying to rein him back in.” So I’m really conscious of: can we talk in a way that makes sense to humans — to the trier of fact?
Lucy Carey-Shields: A hundred percent. I’m the greatest test of your nerd talk, because I feel like a fraud — because my background isn’t technical. I’m a creative person. I went into computer forensics thinking, “I’ll try that,” and then I accidentally got this far.
Blake Sawyer: Accidentally gotten this far.
Lucy Carey-Shields: I suppose I’ll just keep doing it. I always ask: can I understand this concept? Some of the concepts in video forensics are super advanced. Can I explain it to me? And then the next test is, can I explain it to my mum? Would she understand? That’s how I try to present evidence if I’m ever due in court.
Blake Sawyer: I tried “can I present this to my kids,” but now my kids are probably bigger nerds than I am. Don’t tell them this is recording.
Lucy Carey-Shields: They may watch this.
Blake Sawyer: They probably won’t make it this far. It’s fine.
Lucy Carey-Shields: I’ve got some further questions. You are LEVA certified and an IAI certified forensic video examiner.
Blake Sawyer: Yep.
Lucy Carey-Shields: In practical terms, how do these two certifications change how you approach CCTV and video forensics? And can you talk about the importance of knowledge, of certifying yourself, getting that training, and understanding what you’re dealing with?
Blake Sawyer: Sure. The processes between the two are different, but the knowledge base is the same, which is helpful. Going into the LEVA certifications, they teach you the materials and then test you on them. At the end of that process, you take a case you’ve actually worked and present it to them, saying, “This is the opinion I feel comfortable giving based on this evidence.” They look at each aspect — “This is what works, this is what didn’t. How did you do this? Why did you do that?” Part of it is, did you do everything well; part of it is, can you answer those questions well. That’s a nerve-wracking part, for sure.
Lucy Carey-Shields: A hundred percent.
Blake Sawyer: The IAI test is, in some aspects, a lot easier, but in some aspects a lot more difficult, because you take a written test. If you pass the written test, they send you files that you have to work, and they know the answers. You have to answer technical aspects — comparison work, conversion work, clarification — and you send them everything you did, and they say yes or no, you did the right things.
Lucy Carey-Shields: So you have that validation at the end. That’s really good.
Blake Sawyer: From that aspect, it was helpful, because I didn’t have to wait for a case where I’d done analytical work that I had to testify on before being certified. But either way, talking about how you preserve things, documenting all of that is similar.
Lucy Carey-Shields: One of the pitfalls I’ve experienced throughout my time is data retention. Data handling and retention. We talked about legacy media — VHS. We have to cope with the stuff we’re dealing with as if one day it will be legacy media. How do you do that, and what’s your experience with storing this type of data? CDs can become transparent over time — we were storing a lot of our data on CD for a long time. Tapes can disintegrate. What does the future look like for that? And do you have any experience with pitfalls regarding data retention yourself?
Blake Sawyer: I’m going to ask you the same question in a minute, so think about that. It’s hard to say — like I said, it’s been maybe five or six years since I’ve been on the active side of it, so I don’t exactly know what the trends are these days. I know there’s a lot more movement to the cloud, which is good and bad. The benefit is that the cloud is just somebody else’s computer.
Blake Sawyer: If I store that information on somebody else’s computer, the hope is they’ll have backed it up and will make sure it’s ready for me at some point in the future. The downside is I have to keep paying that person to look after my evidence and make sure nothing happens to it. And sometimes people get locked into an ecosystem where they say, “This is our storage system, and it costs too much now for us to switch.” What do you see — especially with computer forensics, where it’s not just video?
Lucy Carey-Shields: For a long time we were storing a lot of stuff on CDs. Then it was deemed that maybe that’s too volatile, because again, they go transparent. One of the ways we’ve dealt with it is tape storage, so I know tape storage is still going on. There’s now a shift to the cloud that I’m aware of. But again, where does that lead? Will those companies still be there in the future? Will the infrastructure still be there?
Blake Sawyer: That’s interesting.
Lucy Carey-Shields: I think this is too big a problem to think about right now, and we’re all sort of just hoping the fix will come and it will all stay the same. But it’s an interesting one. It’s one of the pitfalls I’ve seen that’s caused a lot of issues in court — where data should have been retained and wasn’t, or it’s been retained for too long, because we have strict laws in Europe and the UK about handling it properly. It’s going to be interesting to see how — we were talking about 256-gigabyte iPhones before — we manage that going forward.
Blake Sawyer: Yeah, because if you have to keep that for 25 years, and that’s not your only video or only phone you’ve captured, that’s going to be interesting. If you could give three simple rules for frontline officers — people you work with — in terms of not losing that evidence, preserving stuff from the time they get there, what would those simple tips be?
Lucy Carey-Shields: Good question. Three? Only three. Oof.
Blake Sawyer: Three simple steps.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Okay, three simple steps. One: stop and ask the question — what am I doing? What do I need to do? Should I phone someone? Those are the questions you need to think of. Two: document everything. Write what you see, take pictures. Three: log the time. Do a time check.
Lucy Carey-Shields: The number of times I don’t see a time check — I’ll get some data and it’ll be, “Oh yeah, here’s a hard drive with CCTV on it.” “Did you do a time check?” “Um, dunno.” Do the time check, because — we talk about verification and continuity — when you get to court and all of a sudden your timings are in question, your file timings and your incident timings all have to match up. That’s probably the biggest challenge: explaining why there’s now a discrepancy.
Blake Sawyer: When you say time check — my system at home is probably perfect — but what do you mean by a time check?
Lucy Carey-Shields: You look at the time on the system, and then you look at the actual time in real life. Compare the two, however you do it — whether you use an app, or the atomic clock that’s been ISO-verified and validated. As long as you have a reference point from the time you’re there, looking at the system, to what’s on the screen.
Lucy Carey-Shields: If you have a pixel-embedded timestamp — the time displayed on the footage itself — then you can verify that it’s either spot-on accurate, or we’re four hours out and we’re going to have to explain that. You’ll have to ask the owner of the bar, or whatever, why that is. They might not know. It might just be one of the CMOS batteries going in the system, or a shift to daylight saving time — a lot of our UK systems are usually an hour out in British Summer Time compared to wintertime. As long as you can document that you verified the two times and why they’re different.
Blake Sawyer: What’s the largest offset you’ve seen that you remember?
Lucy Carey-Shields: Ooh. I can’t remember exactly, but I know there’s been, like, eight hours’ difference. And I’m terrible at maths.
Blake Sawyer: Eight hours? Wow.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Then I had to try to work out the difference. I’d see, “Okay, so it’s 1400, and this is like 2000 yesterday.” And they’d say, “So how many hours?” I’m like, “Yes — it’s many hours.” I had to try to work that out. Luckily, these days — because I don’t do retrieval as much anymore — they have special apps that can do a quick maths check. Saves me the embarrassment.
Blake Sawyer: That’s good. FIVE has that built in now too, where you can say, “This is the time.” And if somebody documented the time, that would be helpful too.
Lucy Carey-Shields: That would be absolutely helpful.
Blake Sawyer: I think the largest I saw was off by more than six years.
Lucy Carey-Shields: No way. Really? How did you deal with that?
Blake Sawyer: You just document it. And then, when it comes time to leave — always leave a note. That’s the thing I’ve learned from Arrested Development.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Always leave a note. I love that one. If you take nothing away from this, then: always leave a note.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Okay, I think I’ve asked all my questions for you.
Blake Sawyer: Do you have any cases you wanted to share — where either things went really well, or you’ve looked back and said, “I wish this had been done a little differently”?
Lucy Carey-Shields: If you’re not looking at your cases and going, “What was I doing?” then you’re not developing. Some of the reports I’ve done, even in the past five years, I’ve looked back on and gone, “That is terrible. I would not do that now. Why did I do that?” But there have been other cases where I’ve gone, “That’s really good. Is this me? Did I get someone else to write this?”
Lucy Carey-Shields: A lot of them I can’t talk about, obviously. Some are so sensitive that I could never talk about them. And a lot of them I can’t remember now.
Blake Sawyer: We should specify — some of the reasons you won’t want to talk about them is because you deal a lot with CSAM footage.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Yes, that’s correct.
Blake Sawyer: A lot of that child-exploitative material is things you could never share, or really don’t want to share or talk about.
Lucy Carey-Shields: A hundred percent. And if you don’t need to know about it, then don’t, because it’s a world you just don’t want to be in. About 90% of the other world I work in is that, unfortunately. Which is why — and it’s going to sound insane — if I get a CCTV case, it’s a fantastic break. It’s something technical I can dive into, and it’s a break from seeing something potentially traumatic.
Blake Sawyer: It’s like when you go to YouTube and it tries to play that lo-fi video. It’s a nice, soothing —
Lucy Carey-Shields: Soothing. But then the timescales usually associated with these sort of cases are not very soothing at the same time.
Blake Sawyer: You’re like, “It’s only a homicide this time.”
Lucy Carey-Shields: “Oh, it’s only a murder.” But I can’t really remember now. There are so many things I’d do differently. Looking back, when I was a fledgling technician going out to scenes and climbing into lofts — there are some lofts I now wouldn’t climb into without doing a risk assessment. I had no business going up massive ladders into people’s lofts, but here we are.
Lucy Carey-Shields: I would also have looked more into compression theory — MPEG compression, and what H.264 was — because I didn’t know any of that. I do now. I have a better understanding, and a better understanding of timings in files as well, which is really advanced stuff. I mentioned David Spreadborough before. He’s done really great webinars, which you can find on our YouTube. Stuff like that I had no concept of, which fills me with fear now. If you don’t have that fear looking back on your career, then you haven’t progressed. What about you?
Blake Sawyer: So many things. We learn things along the way. The very first thing — and why we changed what we did at the police department, to move a lot more of the video stuff into the crime scene unit — was because at one point it was all incumbent on the detectives.
Blake Sawyer: The detectives would go back to the scene after the fact, ask for a copy, and these days a lot of people use a cloud system. “Oh, send me the video,” and they upload the file. Well, now you’ve got to authenticate that and make sure that video is what it says it is, and hasn’t been changed — either in the process of the homeowner putting it in the cloud, or the cloud system making its own changes. Those were little changes we had to fix in-house.
Blake Sawyer: I remember one detective, who retired shortly after I started, who had every case he’d ever worked on the same flash drive.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Oh, wow. That’s not redundant at all. If he loses that, that’s his case.
Blake Sawyer: He had checked things into evidence as he needed to, but that was where he kept his main copies of the evidence. So we had to talk through, “Here’s how you handle digital files, and how it’s similar to how you handle physical evidence.” Not that you’d steal a car video, but you wouldn’t take home the bloody knife and bring it back the next day. You’d want to check that in as quickly as you got it. The same is true with our evidence — as soon as you get it, you check it in. It shortens that timeline a little bit.
Lucy Carey-Shields: A hundred percent.
Blake Sawyer: Well, cool. I think that’s all I’ve got.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Same, really — unless you’ve got any words of wisdom?
Blake Sawyer: I don’t have any words of wisdom. But I do have some closing thoughts. Thank you, guys, for tuning in to the first-ever episode. Hopefully they get a lot better from here — we’ll see. I have a lot of hope for the next one. The guys are mostly funny, so it’ll be great.
Blake Sawyer: Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you learn when the next episodes are coming out. Keep listening — you can hear more about the inner workings of Amped, and all the different pieces that we run into. You should be able to find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your source of entertainment.
Blake Sawyer: Also check out the blog. It’s a great, free resource — you can get tons of great information about what we’re up to, how the software works, and training opportunities coming up. If you liked everything you heard, make sure you share this with somebody else to get the word out. Leave a review on whatever podcast platform you use. Thanks again. Stay curious, and stay safe.
Lucy Carey-Shields: Thanks, guys.
