Police investigate crime scenes virtually in the future

Created: 2022-08-29Updated: 2022-08-29 13:16

Boris Pistorius (SPD, l), Interior Minister of Lower Saxony, is standing in the police conference and information center.

© Michael Matthey/dpa

With the VR glasses at the scene of the crime - the investigators should be able to virtually check crime scenes in Lower Saxony again and again, in all details.

And something else worries Interior Minister Pistorius.

Hanover - What if the police overlooked something at a crime scene?

Just check again later - difficult when this crime scene has long since been publicly accessible again.

Even the memory is unlikely to be of much help and will hardly be recognized in court.

The solution: the virtual view.

In the future, it should be possible to inspect the crime scene using virtual reality glasses, said Lower Saxony's Interior Minister Boris Pistorius on Monday in Hanover.

The necessary recordings of the crime scene should come from the "Pixplorer" documentation system, with which all 28 forensic departments are to be equipped nationwide, said the SPD politician.

The aim is to document crime scenes more professionally, to improve the evidence and also to be able to reconstruct accident sites.

Pistorius tried out the device himself - and received a virtual image of the room he was in: "These are my first VR glasses," he said.

“You can look at it very differently than in photos.

You can also walk as long as I don't run into the wall." Then a different environment - a building captured by 3D scanning: "That's a different number than the boring hall here," said Pistorius.

"You can go in and look into the last corner."

The advantage of the new technology: The officers could move around the crime scene afterwards, measure distances afterwards and look at objects, explained Pistorius.

The two-dimensional images are processed using editing and display software in such a way that the viewer wearing VR glasses can move around the crime scene interactively.

In order to create the corresponding image, the technology needs three minutes per location.

If there were 3D data from certain buildings, they could be used to prepare for SEK operations, and officers could also train at different locations at the same time.

Pistorius also spoke on Monday about an employee survey that showed that job satisfaction in the police force had improved.

In total, more than 14,500 police employees took part in the survey at the end of 2021.

That's 60 percent of the total workforce, said State Police Director Ralf Leopold.

According to this, 67 percent of those surveyed expressed a high level of satisfaction with their work - after 62 percent in 2018. 41.1 percent stated that the staffing level was insufficient - in 2018 it was almost 50 percent.

Pistorius said there have never been more police officers in Lower Saxony than there are today.

Nevertheless: "We will certainly not stop hiring and training police officers."

Pistorius emphasized that the increasing participation in the survey shows that many police officers see it as an opportunity.

In 2018, participation was still 51.9 percent, with a total of almost 12,000 employees taking part at the time.

If the officials are under a lot of work, for example in the case of investigations into child abuse and children as victims of crime, "we are currently already in the process of making it possible to compensate by increasing special leave for the colleagues involved in this area of ​​crime," he said.

In order to make the work of the police easier, modern and smart solutions for police work are to come from a dedicated team of experts, the Innovation Hub.

According to the information, 15 IT specialists will work together with police officers in the “idea factory” at the start.

"We have to try and see what works," said Pistorius.

Similar initiatives only exist in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse.

dpa