The department's own crime lab handles 85 to 90 percent of cases involving video, and he said it analyzes 100 percent of video gathered by its own officers.īut sometimes MPD gets video from outside sources, and that can be a challenge because the different camera systems use different compression schemes, called codecs, Allen said, to capture and store the images. Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Rob Allen said the department doesn't use Target's video forensic services very often. Steinhour testified that the pants in the video appeared to be similar to a pair of jeans police seized from Ali's apartment days after the shooting. But he was wearing a pair of cuffed jeans with lighter coloring on the thighs. In the Seward Market triple homicide case, Steinhour examined security camera footage, which showed that Ali's face was covered. They recovered the child in Alabama, shortly thereafter, completely safe and the suspect was put away and is serving time in federal prison," he said. "Because of this lead for law enforcement, we were actually able to assist them.
Steinhour said that helped narrow the search for law enforcement investigators as they looked up state motor vehicle records.
They were also able to pick out the first number of the car's license plate - number 3. Target analysts figured out the suspect was driving a Kia Spectra. "You can blend those images together, if they're stationary, and what we're going to do is get a lot higher quality of an image of the subject that's not moving," and create a better opportunity to track down the car, he said. However, Steinhour said none of the images was clear enough to capture the car's license plates or the make and model of the car. The other images of the car were taken by surveillance cameras from a number of different sources, including one in a WalMart parking lot. "This image is actually comprised of about a dozen separate, individual images." "As you notice, there's a lot of ghosting in this image," Steinhour said. The car was on a road surrounded by other vehicles, and next to that image was a set of faint images of similar-looking automobiles.
Working the keyboard in front of a series of monitors, he displayed the image of a blue compact car driven by a person suspected of kidnapping a newborn infant in Ardmore, Tenn., in 2009.
Steinhour, a tall, stout man with bushy red hair, was happy to show off the lab's abilities for a reporter. That's the same group that accredited the crime labs at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Minneapolis Police Department. "We take the philosophy - it's a Midwestern company - that we don't want to be just in the community, we want to be part of the community," he said.Ĭontained in a single room on the company's Brooklyn Park campus, the criminal lab is one of about 400 operations worldwide - including only about two dozen private organizations - to receive accreditation from the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. Target Vice President of Assets Protection Brad Brekke said the company's relationship with police departments is just one part of a broader policy on charitable giving.
Target forensic analyst Jake Steinhour even testified during the recent trial of Mahdi Hassan Ali, who was convicted of killing three men last year at the Seward Market in Minneapolis.
takes the concept one step further, lending its high-end technology and professionals to law enforcement agencies free of charge, often on high-profile cases. It's not uncommon for large retail stores to use high-tech video surveillance and forensics to catch shoplifters, but Minnesota-based Target Corp.