Recording The Response. Good or Bad?

My department wants to start to record some of our responces? I see no problem with it, what do you ladies & men think?

Also if you have some rigging the camera idea's or pictues of how your camera system is set up lets see some pictures.

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Permalink Reply by digitalally on January 5, 2011 at 10:01am

It can certainly be argued either way whether or not the system should be recording all the time, and i agree with you that there's definitely performance benefits to recording all the time. One issue that's from a purely logistical standpoint is retention of the recordings, though. If you want to keep them for some time, it does make it easier and less expensive if you're only recording so-called important events. Also, the automatic record triggers can be a lot of things, from turning on the lights or siren to backing up or even opening the door, and the sensor that makes it record a crash can also be set to record all the time surrounding a swerve or hard stop. Plus, I believe you can set how long it records and so forth. So yeah, depending on the video system, it can be tailored to whatever the department decides they want.

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Permalink Reply by bill wilby on January 5, 2011 at 7:39pm

you have to watch recording mva`s with the hipa laws you could get sued

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Permalink Reply by Seth Malcolm on January 5, 2011 at 8:56pm

It can be a really good thing to record reponces And a bad thing as well, fire ok EMS NO in one word HIPPA I work as a 911 medic on a MICU unit and let me tell ya people will pull you into court for the littlest things. And no way would I put a persona camera in a unit are pov al all

Keep your head down and stay safe

S Malcolm EMT FF

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Permalink Reply by GARY HANSON on January 6, 2011 at 9:17am

You are right , Bryon, to it being a "double edged sword". We, as a "District", have an automatic "Transmit activated" recorder on all voice transmissions that open our "repeater com channel". It can, upon review, only by our District Chief and his Assistant Chief, who was going 10-8, time of departure and arrival and wther information about scene happenings. We almost always have "ratchet jaws" who chatter incessantly (unnecessarily) till someone directs "All persons on scene to to TAC 4 (or whatever channel) and keep the chatter down!"

If there has been an incident, traffic accident or something going wrong at the scene, the recording might help the Chief use the recorded information to make sure we know how to avoid those mistakes in future calls.

Only in one instance has there been a call from the court for our recorded information. This was about our response to an MVA. The family of the victim of a one vehicle werck, decided (LAWYERS of course!) to sue the fire department for what they said was the our failure to save the life of the driver of the vehicle. The recording debunked the claims of the lawyer and the judge scolded him for frivolous action.

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Permalink Reply by digitalally on January 6, 2011 at 10:05am

We work with RAM mounts - they're really high quality and you can attach to just about anything with all the options they have.

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Permalink Reply by digitalally on January 6, 2011 at 10:10am

Another benefit to in-car video systems that's really started gaining popularity lately is streaming video. Fire, EMS and police can all stream video to each other for better situational awareness before arriving at the scene and so forth. Can definitely come in useful sometimes.

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Permalink Reply by 1p8julv1mw9jx on January 10, 2011 at 11:07am

This a good question and i feel is becoming more of a hot topic all the time. The personal video cameras being used to show responses and action while on scene can lead to the best of training to the worst of litigation.

My brother firefighter and I started a website that features peoples videos from youtube and other public video sites the site is http://www.firevidz.com/. We started the site because we are not fighting fires every day, but if we can watch other brothers and sisters across the nation as they fight fires it is invaluable training for us and crew training. Traditions Training http://traditionstraining.com/ is a great example of this. They use helmet cam footage from incidents that make some invaluable training, and some of the videos include voice overs of what to look for or what priorities should be used on that incident. We have don't have row houses and it is very rare to find a house with burglar bars in my district, but because of their work we can make plans on how to deal with fires that may present with a similar hazard.

Another thing these cameras can and should be used for is videoing our own training. Use that video as a tool to see how you actually responded, or showing how you throw ladders. That is the other half of our firevidz site. Gathering training videos from all over the US on how people throw ladders, different hose loads, vehicle extrication classes. This way we can watch techniques from all over with different perspectives, then take what we can from those trainings and see if we could do our jobs better with their tips.

In the bad part of the personal camera on scene is everything is discoverable. If you make response videos get them off the camera, edit them, review them with the department administration to get their approval of use and a final product. All other video not used on cameras and computers should be assessed on its removal and deletion.

I am not a lawyer but that would be my thoughts.

Brandon