State of the art Video Identification System Launched
Following a request last year by Police Commissioner – Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin – for assistance in modernizing Jamaica’s constabulary, a new state of the art video identification system was launched yesterday at the Kingston Central Police Station. The system was funded by the United States and British governments at a cost of just under J$15 million and will allow witnesses and victims of crime to identify suspects in a safe environment. It will eventually replace the conventional identification parades.
At present, identification parades can sometimes take weeks to be completed, as the police have complained that it is often difficult to compile a group of persons with features similar to those of the accused. With the new video ID system, there will be a database consisting of head and shoulder moving images of suspects, along with volunteer images. These will be shown to the witness in the presence of the suspect’s attorney or a Justice of the Peace.
In addition, all activities inside the new identification parade room will be recorded on a closed circuit television system in order to help ensure the security and integrity of the system. The taking of the image and the showing of the parade will be done in the presence of an attorney or a Justice of the Peace in order to ensure that the interests of the suspect are upheld as well.
The system currently has over 20,000 images in its database already, but there are some particular categories of person who are not yet on there including – persons with long dreadlocks, rastafarians, albinos and a few others with “unusual appearances”.
Tags : police video system, state of the art video system, video id system, video identification system
One Response to “State of the art Video Identification System Launched”
said on September 17th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
[...] instructed the police to shut down its state-of-the-art video identification parade system which was launched in January of this year. It was not immediately clear what the legal concerns were with regard to the system, but [...]
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