THE aftermath of the Stanley Cup riot was a startling reminder of just how much of our daily lives is recorded on video.
In the wake of the violence, the Vancouver police were swamped by a thousand hours of video and more than a million digital pictures.
It's an extreme example, but every day civil and criminal cases increasingly hinge on video and photographic evidence.
In an unmarked office somewhere on the North Shore, two North Vancouver men make their living by helping that evidence tell the clearest possible story.
"A lot of times we'll get the video and play it and it won't mean anything to you," said David McKay, president of Blackstone Forensics. "It's sometimes difficult to interpret with our eyes what's happening. It's my job to take that information, process it and clarify it so that a judge or a jury or a lay person can interpret what's occurred."
McKay first got involved with digital media shooting snowboard videos, before taking a forensics program at BCIT and an internship with the North Vancouver RCMP in 2003.
"I was introduced to a relatively unknown field called forensic video analysis," he said. "From there I eventually got hired by the RCMP in their forensic identification section as a video analyst."
McKay stayed with the Mounties for six years, then returned to school to train as a security systems technician and go into business for himself. Blackstone not only analyzes video, it also advises clients on how to install an effective security camera system.
"The thing I noticed was that there's a lot of evidence being captured on video, but a lot of it is really poor-quality evidence," McKay said. "It was my job, if a bank was robbed or anything else captured on camera, to extract that evidence from the system and process it to provide the best evidence possible for court. Then I would go to court and present that evidence."
Blackstone has won contracts across Canada and in the United States. The company has worked for ICBC, nightclubs, a major restaurant chain, private investigators, government agencies, prosecutors and several law firms. As well as being an expert witness, McKay is also accredited as a presenter by the Law Society of B.C.
"They're pretty happy about the new information they didn't know they can use," said Graham Harding, Blackstone's vicepresident for sales and marketing. "With more and more iPhones and people taking video, it's becoming much more prevalent."
Blackstone has been asked to repackage security footage for media release, track a particular bundle of money through the counting process on a bank's surveillance system, authenticate images and enhance video.
"We had one case where they didn't have the skills to use Photoshop, but they were actually cutting and pasting images and then scanning them," McKay recalled. "It's pretty obvious when you look at it that it's not a real image. But you have to go beyond that. You can't just say, 'It's obviously fake.' You have to go through the whole process so . . . you can back it up and say 'They did this, this and this' . . . so the defence or the Crown, on the other side, can't say 'Well how do you know this? I can see the same thing you're seeing, why are your eyes better than mine?'"
At the other end of the spectrum is the painstaking software analysis needed to determine if a digital photo has been skillfully altered.
McKay is often called on to try and extract details from video. In one example, a security camera records the back of a parked car, but the licence plate is lost in blurry shadow. Close examination reveals a very slight variation in some of the pixels from frame to frame.
"It's actually recorded video. And because we have this change in pixels and this information that changes, we can use that to make an enhanced image. Each individual frame is going to be a little bit different and we can take advantage of that."
By essentially superimposing each slightly different image and applying a technique called frame averaging, a legible licence plate number is revealed.
McKay is also program co-ordinator for forensic science at BCIT, and if there is a silver lining in the Stanley Cup riots, it's that many of his students got a job. "The reason why is unfortunate," McKay said, "but it was great that we got that opportunity. But that would be the type of case where (Blackstone) would probably work with defence. If any of these cases went to trial and video and photographic evidence is used against them, that's something we might be able to assist the defence with."
One high-profile case that McKay was involved with was the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport in 2007. In the inquiry that followed, the RCMP's analyst testified that the amateur video of the incident confirmed the four officers' account that Dziekanski approached them in a threatening manner. The sequence is complicated by the camera zooming out at the moment he is said to be moving forward.
"He measured the number of pixels on Mr. Dziekanski's jacket with the pixels on the wall, a fixed point," McKay said. "He did a statistical analysis between what is a stationary object and what should be a moving object, and what he found was there was enough of a difference so show him that he was moving forward. Obviously that was a big development."
Don Rosenbloom, a lawyer for the Polish government, asked Blackstone to review the RCMP analyst's work.
"He didn't take enough fixed measurement points," McKay said. "He had a good theory but he didn't quite apply the right principles. And at the end he couldn't say for sure if Mr. Dziekanski moved three large steps or two inches. That's what was really important, that we could determine that."
Strangely enough, the analyst whose conclusion he debunked was one of McKay's first instructors.
McKay charges $125 for an hour of his time, and said most cases take an average of 10 hours. He readily admits there is a limit to what can be done, and "really, really poor quality video is unfortunately going to stay really, really poor quality video."
But, he says, it's always worth a look. "If it's something that can help you in court with a lawsuit worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars, it's worth going through the process."
.png;w=120;h=80;mode=crop)