Take a look back in time, think about the past decade. Then the five years before that, the two before then, and the six months before that. I can't say definitively, but I am willing to bet there's a pattern - beats in time where the technology bubble gets that much bigger.

I try and keep my ear to the ground listening for any rumbles of anything being made for law enforcement. One, they usually are quite interesting once you start digging into their backstories. Mostly it's my job and that first perk is exactly that, a rather convenient quality that makes the potentially monotonous beating of the publishing industry skip.

So I recently I found a few of these hiccups. Some are made specifically for police work, for officer safety, some have a razor-straight relationship with the investigation/forensic field. Others ... not so much. These fall under the "did you know" arena and with just a slight change in their game they very well could have a future in law enforcement.

1

 What's That Beeping?

First was just announced recently that seems to want to offer a line of officer safety. There's been radiation detectors for years but they've been large, bulky, not that portable and ... let's just say heavy on the budget. FLIR's new identiFINDER R100 Personal Radiation Detector basically is the Toughbook of officer-worn radiation detectors. It's not meant to tell you WHAT type of radiation just of the danger.

Want to figure out what you're walking in? FLIR's got a line of products for that purpose.

Check it out at Officer.com/12267440.

2

 One more use for your smartphone

What looks to have been announced back this mid-summer, a company called BlueFire Tech came out with a smartphone based endoscope.

It costs $22.99 (on Amazon).

The version I found was for Android (probably because that's the type of phone I use) but they do have one for Apple. It's marketed for home inspections like looking into vents and drains.

Look, we're all here on Officer.com, I'm sure you can figure where I'm going with this. It might not be the most rugged piece of equipment and doesn't provide as many features as those from companies that actually specialize in fiberscopes/endoscopes, but they claim that this thing is IP67 rated with a little LED light. 

3

 Forensics - 3D reconstruction from photos

In the lucky investigations where you get a bunch of images of the suspects face some research now says a 3D face can be constructed. From University of Washington a project took images from the Internet - say Former President George W. Bush - and made a 3D representation of faces.

A chunk of the project's abstract: "A person's face, e.g., Tom Hanks, can be modeled and animated in 3D from a completely uncalibrated photo collection. Most methods, however, focus solely on face area and mask out the rest of the head. This paper proposes that head modeling from the Internet is a problem we can solve. We target reconstruction of the rough shape of the head. Our method is to gradually "grow" the head mesh starting from the frontal face and extending to the rest of views using photometric stereo constraints. We call our method boundary-value growing algorithm."

I told you ... strange and unusual.

Now imagine applying this to an investigation where you find the person in a bunch of images on social media.

I'll just leave it there.

You can find the University of Washington here. 

4

 What's an invisible television?

Television? No. That's a monitor. Televisions haven't been "televisions" for quite some time now. Televisions were huge, heavy and you stacked the new one on top of the older when it broke. You didn't get Netflix on it - you had a strange channel labeled "U".

Recently, at the CEATEC Electronics Expo in Japan (no I didn't attend) and originally at the Las Vegas CES (didn't go to that either) Panasonic put an invisible monitor on display. In a piece from Sciencealert.com by David Nield, "When switched on, it's just like a normal TV. When switched off, it's as transparent as glass, meaning you can see the wall or shelving behind."

He explains the screens are movable and light themselves, "the screen uses the latest OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology, where each pixel lights itself (rather than being lit from behind)."

I edited this image above myself from a couple of screenshots on the YouTube video to help illustrate what this technology actually looks like. The left is the screen invisible where the right is with the display on just a few seconds afterward.

Nield writes that this technology is looking to be bendable as to roll away if you want items behind. Forgive me, but your windshield has a little curve to it. I'm not saying cover the entire thing up, but perhaps this could get important information to officers without having to look away from the road or the suspect parked in front of them during a traffic stop.

5

 VR ... and not we're not talking fun games

Here's one that's actually marketing their effort to public safety. Motorola is exploring the possibility where and how virtual reality could be utilized for law enforcement.

As their August 10 release puts it, "[VR] will immerse a public safety command center supervisor in an incident scene. By using a combination of virtual reality and eye-interaction technologies to navigate through video and data feeds from multiple sources, incident responses can be quickly coordinated and information shared widely to help guide officers and protect people at the scene."

You can find more about this here. 

I do see a possibility here. I hope, however, the headset becomes a LOT lighter and a LOT less bulky. Right now most models I've seen online look to be pretty much front-heavy. They look like my neck's going to get tired and sore trying to hold this chunk up - especially for someone at command or sitting the long hours at dispatch. Like most anything, it's the work we put in today that makes tomorrow's technology.

Oh that's good. I should quote myself.

6

 3D printing

Did you hear about the locked iPhone? The one where police couldn't unlock it? The one where police asked a 3D printing lab to recreate a dead man's prints to unlock the phone?

Did you hear about that one?

Yeah. That happened this past summer. (2016 has been weird.)

As Rose Eveleth of Fusion.net writes, "the police already have a scan of the victim’s fingerprints taken while he was alive (apparently he had been arrested previously). They gave those scans to the lab, and using them Arora has created 3D printed replicas of all ten digits."

Don't jump the gun, this isn't foolproof yet. Back then testing had to be done but afterward the piece says the lab would hand over the prints. There's also the Fifth Amendment to consider ...

... and a possible passcode.

7

 A dog that doesn't breath

The insanity of Boston Dynamics has always rose my eyebrow. And now they've created something that looks like a dog.

Told you.

ITechPost.com writes about SpotMini discussing about how it can help around the house. That's great and all, but now, let's put a Noptic camera on it, with FLIR's new radiation detector, perhaps a portable x-ray ... or cellphone technology sensor ... a good data transmitter ... and ...

See where I'm going with this? If proven and actually useful in the field with, like, long lasting batteries and the ability to, say, survive outside - law enforcement might just have the potential for a new partner. You'll just have to afford it and get over it's horrific looks. Seriously, check out the video.

Ok, that's it.

Neat.

Right?

Stay safe out there.