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LAPD has a new tool for crowdsourcing photo and video evidence

Citizen-provided evidence is clearly on the up. With the amount of cameras knocking about, this is hardly surprising. However, when something goes down at a large public event, the mass of well-meaning user-submitted evidence can cause data bottlenecks, or a stretch of resources making sense of it. This ends up potentially doing more harm than good. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has sought to resolve such issues by working with Amazon's Web Service to create an app for submitting photo and video evidence that takes advantage of AWS's deep bandwidth pockets. Called the Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository (LEEDIR), the web, Android and iOS apps serve as a direct line, and central repository for user-generated evidence. Unsurprisingly, some privacy advocates are twitchy about the idea of bystanders caught on video being implicated, but its creators claim that this is something that professional law enforcement is equipped to deal with such issues as a matter of routine. Currently the app is being used as part of investigations for a recent riot in Isla Vista, but it's hoped it could become a routine tool for similar events in the future.