Front page New York Daily News article about camera phone and subway flasher

The New York Daily News published a front page article (see Treo 650 camera phone image below) about a Catholic schoolgirl who snapped a camera phone photo of a man who exposed himself in a subway and then showed the photo to a police officer who found and arrested the man, according to the May 5, 2005 article.

The article says:

"A subway pervert was caught in a flash yesterday by feisty Catholic schoolgirls armed with a cell phone camera in Queens, cops and witnesses said.  The suspect sicko flashed the teens twice last week as they rode the F train toward their high school in Jamaica Estates.

"He got away -- but made the mistake of lurking inside the 179th St. station yesterday just as the girls stepped off the train at 7:30 a.m.  Terrified, but determined to get the creep arrested, one of the girls snapped his photo with her cell phone and ran to NYPD Officer Vincent Tieniber for help, police sources said."

New age policing

The police officer ran down the subway platform and spotted the man getting on a train.   The officer grabbed him and brought the  man to girls, who identified him. 

A high-ranking police source says the incident was, "A little bit of new-age policing."

I posted two camera phone photos of the article -- the front page headline and the page three story (see Treo 650 camera phone image below) -- using my Treo 650 camera -- on my Treo 650 moblog.

What I did

I was at the library this afternoon and glanced at a stack of newspapers.  The headline jumped out a me!  I photographed the pages with the 650 and used a library computer to log onto the New York Daily News Web site.  I was glad to see the article was online and sent it to myself.

(Written on and transmitted from my RIM BlackBerry, and the edited online.)

Note:  I saved the Treo 650 photos to its SD card and transferred them to my desktop PC where I enhanced the images (knid of!) using Paint Shop Pro.  Someone who really knows what he's doing could, I'm sure, make the images look much better than I did. 

The "raw" images from the 650 (two of which are on my textamerica Treo 650 moblog) certainly were good enough to post.  You can get an idea of the quality of the 650 images, before "enhancement," by looking at two of them on my moblog.

Comments

[Tychocat]

I'm still thinking that one niche for camphones may be the equivalent of an airliner's "black box", keeping an audio/video record of everything done by the bearer for, say, 12 hours. My S710a can fit an admittedly blurry 42-second video record in about 5 megs of memory, so a 12-hour recording should fit in about 5 gigs - not technically implausible, given the Samsung SGH-i300 was announced in March with 3-gig hard drive.

The potential for making amateur/semi-pro journalists out of all of us will depend on the camphone reaching at least VHS/CIF/broadcast resolution, I suspect. It's particularly intriguing to speculate on the impact of camphones with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections, which might allow news outlets to bail on the heavy tech-laden news vehicles to transmit video to the base station. This might also blur the traditional boundary between print and broadcast news outlets, as there's no reason a newspaper with an Internet edition couldn't offer video.

A broadcast-quality camphone could also finally realize the promise of truly local news outlets, as bloggers step up and add staff. If you publish online, how tough would it be to focus on an area as small as a block? And if anyone can be a journalist, how does this change the role of traditional reporters?