The British Transport Police will not investigate many categories of bicycle theft, the BBC learns.

My lad’s bike was stolen from a train station a few months back. He’d left it there while he was at work. He works for longer than an hour a day, like many others.

This was the BTP’s response, so it’s kind of mad to see that it’s actual policy now.

Really makes you glad to pay the old national insurance and council tax, y’know?

OC text by @DJDarren@sopuli.xyz

  • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    6 days ago

    As someone who occasionally has to scrub through hours of security camera footage, these cops need to learn what a binary search is. We had some art get stolen from our gallery, and I had to search through ~5 days of footage to find it. I found it in about 3 minutes with a binary search.

    Start by defining your timeline. In my case, it was about 5 days (so roughly 120 hours) over the course of a long weekend. Then divide that time in half, (60 hours) and start at the middle. Is the artwork still there? If so, you know you don’t need to bother scrubbing through the first 60 hours at all. Or if it’s already missing, you know you don’t need to bother searching through the second half. Then divide the remaining half in half again, (30 hours) and do the same. Repeat, each time dividing the potential search by half. With only 10 divisions, (each taking only a few seconds to figure out what the next halfway point is and jump to it in the security camera program), I have already narrowed my search down from 5 days to ~7 minutes. And it only took me a few minutes total. And at that point, I just scrub through manually until I find the culprit.

    My boss was just sitting at her computer, watching the video at like 2x speed from hour 0, hoping to eventually catch the person. After like 20 minutes of that she gave up and passed it off to me. And I had the incident found in like 3 or 4 minutes total.

    The only real reason the cops have to avoid scrubbing through footage is laziness.