Inspector Les Yeo (center), commander of Vancouver’s Integrated Riot Investigation Team, is interviewed by Canada’s Global News on Sunday in the Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab at the University of Indianapolis.
The world’s top forensic video experts are gathering at the University of Indianapolis for the next two weeks to help Canadian investigators process footage of widespread rioting that occurred in Vancouver after June’s Stanley Cup hockey finals.
The investigation is the largest of its type in Canadian history, and this is the first time the Digital Multimedia Evidence Processing Lab at UIndy has been used in an active criminal probe of this scope. Lead investigators and UIndy representatives will discuss the project and answer questions at 11 a.m. Monday at the university.
The one-of-a-kind lab features 20 high-powered workstations used by the Law Enforcement & Emergency Services Video Association, known as LEVA, to train law enforcement and security professionals from around the world in the collection, processing and court presentation of video evidence. Its capacity will allow Vancouver’s Integrated Riot Investigation Team to process more than 1,600 hours of video in about two weeks – work that might have taken more than two years elsewhere.
The video analysis will involve 47 experts representing 40 law enforcement agencies from the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom, working in two shifts each day. Several hundred people are expected to be charged in the postgame rioting and looting, which caused millions of dollars in property losses.
LEVA began offering its courses at UIndy in 2004 and established the lab in 2007.
A forensic video analyst works with images captured during widespread rioting June 15 in Vancouver, B.C. The lab at UIndy, with its 20 networked video workstations, is the only facility where the more than 1,600 hours of accumulated footage can be processed in a timely fashion for use as evidence in hundreds of criminal cases.
