Tempe police obtained the video from Uber, Uber could have easily altered it before handing it over. Uber has behaved badly in the past, and they had the motivation and past experience to do what it takes to advance their agenda.
Remember, Uber terminated its autonomous driving testing as a result of this preventable tragedy.
What's the timeframe on the video being handled, given to police, etc. Do the police have the authority to take any video files recorded by a vehicle involved in an auto accident? Is a warrant needed?
It's more likely that the police opened an investigation, and as part of the investigation, handed over dashcam footage. We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident.
IIRC the video was released by the police the next day
> We have no reason to believe the police simply confiscated the video files on the night of the accident.
From my own experience, the police will take dashcam video evidence the first chance they get because it's the best data they can get their hands on while on a scene. Source: I had interactions with the police on two separate occasions (once when my dashcam happened to record a car break-in taking place as I was driving into a parking lot, and once when some guy road raged me). On the second occasion, they were reviewing the video less than 15 minutes from the time of the incident and had the whole thing resolved within the hour.
Besides, as I said earlier, Uber itself is making a statement admitting it was at fault, and the NTSB investigation has way more forensic data than the crappy quality dashcam video police released, so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative.
> so I don't see how doctoring the dashcam video would fit into the narrative.
Well, at the end of the day this is all involves a strong element of PR & perceptions, so regardless of the quality of other data, it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video be in the initial stories about this accident.
> it would be very much in Uber's interest to have a super dark video
Why? As soon as the video came out, the first thing people (correctly) pointed out was that the dynamic range of the dashcam was crap. Besides, everyone knows that self-driving cars are essentially giant self-telemetry collection machines, so one would have to be either extremely short-sighted or incredibly stupid to think they would be able to get away with a "well it was too dark!" lie after the NTSB got on the case and the media caught wind of the shenanigans.
Also, as I said in my linked comment above, the logistics of actually attempting to tamper the video would be borderline comical.
It's much more plausible that the dashcam dynamic range was in fact crap and that the police officers at the scene were smart enough to figure out to just pop off the SD card off the dashcam.
>It's much more plausible that the dashcam dynamic range was in fact crap and that the police officers at the scene were smart enough to figure out to just pop off the SD card off the dashcam.
..and Uber's lawyers figured that most people have no idea what "dynamic range" is and will eat up "it was dark" as a legitimate excuse for this manslaughter.
There likely was no need to manipulate that video. It was still quite dishonest to release it without clarifying that it was nothing like what either a human or Uber's sensors would see in BIG BOLD RED LETTERS. Most people don't really know better.
Well, if this thread is any indication, people seem to always be confusing the roles and actions of lawyers, PR and the police to fit some bizarre conspiracy theory. The fact is that the dashcam video was released by police, and Uber admitted to being at fault with this latest statement. I honestly don't get why you're talking about lawyers now.
I talked about "lawyers" because I don't know which part of Uber is responsible for damage control and would carefully vet all public statements in such scenarios. I assume it's the legal dept. because that's my understanding of procedures in the place I worked at.
The facts are that:
1. The dashcam video is highly misleading, as many people assumed that the accident would have been hard for a human to avoid based on the video. See threads like [1] - please read the top comment there.
2. The police released a misleading statement, echoing the same sentiment - that the accident was hard to avoid.
3. Uber sat silent for 50 days - long enough for people to stop caring - before admitting fault.
There is no conspiracy here. The actions of the police department have misled the public in Uber's favor (yes, we can assume incompetence as the reason), and Uber used this to their advantage by keeping silent for two months (as any company likely would). This is expected.
What I don't expect is the public cutting Uber any slack in this scenario.
> which part of Uber is responsible for damage control
Damage control typically falls in the realm of public relations, not legal. Legal can help inform PR on what to say, but then again, so can any other relevant department, including engineering.
> Uber sat silent for 50 days
I was under the impression this was by request from NTSB. I mean, even your own criticism is that the dashcam video being released prematurely caused the public at large to reach inaccurate conclusions. Investigations take time. We can't have the cake and eat it too.
BTW, the comment you linked to seems pretty representative of the general response to the video: "yes it looks dark, but Lidar should've seen her"
>I mean, even your own criticism is that the dashcam video being released prematurely caused the public at large to reach inaccurate conclusions.
That is correct.
>BTW, the comment you linked to seems pretty representative of the general response to the video: "yes it looks dark, but Lidar should've seen her"
LIDAR is the red herring here. The less crappy camera would have seen her. The naked eye would have seen her. Pretty much anything but that dashcam would. Even the dashcam, perhaps, if it was set to higher exposure.
And that was someone who knows about LIDAR talking - most of people don't know what a LIDAR is. And so a lot of people really accepted the "it was dark" line of reasoning, never stopping to think that it would simply imply that Uber was driving beyond its headlights.
>I was under the impression this was by request from NTSB... Investigations take time.
Right, that's where "cutting Uber some slack" comes in. It can't feasibly take 50 days to come to the following conclusion: "we screwed up here, the pedestrian clearly shows up on vehicle cameras/sensors the moment she steps into the roadway" - which seems to be the case here (again, even now, we can't say that for sure!).
I can't blame Uber for not admitting fault - it's in their interest to do so. I do blame the city and the general public for letting Uber get away with that, and creating an overall victim-blaming sentiment (which was there from day 1 - including searching the public records of the victim).
To be fair, I doubt the police just "popped the SD card out of dashcam"... more likely Uber had managers (and lawyers) at the scene within a short time window and Uber had time for very careful deliberations before handing anything to the NTSB (though as you say it's still more likely the got they raw dashcam footage instead of an altered video)
Here is the more likely order of events:
1. Driver calls supervisor
2. Supervisor redirects call to senior Uber lawyer
3. Uber lawyer says "Don't do anything until we get to the scene. Be polite to police but tell them to wait until our legal team arrives"
4. Legal team at scene, talks with uber CEO (and senior lawyers over phone) then after an hour or so tells NTSB they will hand over footage after engineer arrives and extracts the dashcam footage
5. Engineer hands dashcam footage to lawyers, who then hand it to NTSB
That still sounds pretty farfetched IMHO. You're basically saying that both the supervisor and a senior lawyer were on call at 10:30pm on some random day _and_ were immediately available upon request _and_ knew exactly what to do and who to call next _and_ the police were just twiddling their thumbs the whole time, despite there being a dead body on the scene. And lawyers/engineers can teleport from SF to Tempe somehow since there's no way they would've been able to fly in with that short notice so late at night.
If anything, I'd imagine that the police would be blocking access to the accident area and the car, especially to an alleged Uber employee trying to muck around with evidence without a government-sanctioned body overseeing forensics.
If I were to make a guess, I'd imagine it would've gone like this:
- "omg, I just hit someone"
- driver sees victim on the ground, panics and calls 911
- police and paramedics arrive
- police interviews driver, gets the account of the story, checks paperwork, get driver's information
- driver tries calling supervisor to escalate the issue (potentially unsuccessfully)
- paramedics declare victim dead, driver gets upset, body eventually is taken away while police tries to calm the driver
- tow truck arrives, takes car into police custody
- next morning, local police investigators look at the car in the impound, find the dashcam and look at the video. Uber ATG wakes up to the bad news and scrambles to figure out what went wrong and what to do next. The engineering team is still nowhere near Arizona and probably too busy wading through TBs of sensor/AI data to even remember there was a cheap dashcam installed in the car.
- Police releases a statement (w/ the dashcam video)
- NTSB gets involved in the investigation and gets in contact with Uber to understand how to acquire forensic data out of the SDV's databases.
So our differences in interpretation are exactly what distinguishes a "fantastic lawyer" from a "mediocre lawyer"- I agree if Uber has mediocre lawyers your scenario is more likely. A "fantastic lawyer" will have someone competent at ground zero dealing with the police on behalf of the company and handling the temp worker driving the car (otherwise the only representative of the Uber corporation and likely to incriminate the company) in 45 minutes.
> A "fantastic lawyer" will have someone competent at ground zero in 45 minutes
Gonna be honest, that sounds like something straight out of a hollywood movie. In reality, when suddenly presented with a unexpected event, real people simply aren't physically able to coordinate narrative-altering eloquence training so perfectly on a 30 minute notice close to midnight on some random day. That's kinda like saying that if a macdonalds night-shift employee witnessed a customer choking to death on a lye-contaminated drink, a super star legal team would be on the scene in 45 minutes to instruct the employee on how to avoid incriminating the company when talking to the police. That simply isn't how the world works.
If they are doing a self driving car pilot, it would be stupid not to have some junior legal staff in the same or nearby county. The senior lawyer just calls the junior staff (who are always potentially on the clock when it comes to that type of work) and says "get your ass down there!"
That doesn't seem like a Hollywood movie to me, that just seems like the way competent people operate.
Again, the whole notion seems completely misinformed. It would be ridiculously wasteful to have junior lawyers sit around in a completely different office from HQ just in case something happened.
And if you ever do on-call, you need a rotation system. In my team, on-call rotates among 9 people, none of which is required to get their ass anywhere in the wee hours of the night even if the world is ending. Requiring such commitment on top of a regular workload is completely unrealistic, and the notion that it actually got carried out as efficiently as could be is borderline wishful thinking. The alternative is shiftwork, which is fundamentally incompatible with the nature of the legal industry, and thus doesn't actually happen.
What's more, talking with the police is not a skill that is cultivated by corporate lawyers at all, or any lawyer for that matter, especially if we're talking about a 911 call.
Perhaps another obvious indication that uber would be unable to deploy SWAT-style legal teams is the number of outages they experience and their durations, despite having literally hundreds of highly paid engineers on call who are able to rollback bad deploys from their phones.
Um, nope. While this might be valid for HN, I see the scapegoat video paraded around as "proof" that nobody could have done anything, every.damn.time the collision is mentioned.
Remember, Uber terminated its autonomous driving testing as a result of this preventable tragedy.