Stop Police!

HI

In those Stop Police! Programs they often show a driver being questioned and videoed from the police car.
The question is how do they get the audio?
The police car is usually parked some way back from the “suspect” vehicle yet we can hear everything that is said by the cop and the “suspect”
How do they do that? Get the sound?? :slight_smile:

If the sound quality is OK-to-poor, then you’re probably hearing the real thing, recorded by a wireless microphone the cop wears amongst his other gear. The car’s VCR installation includes a wireless receiver. Nothing too mysterious about that.

If the audio is excellent quality, you’re probably hearing a studio voice-over.

A good 75% of everything you hear on those Police video shows is dubbed on extras faked by the show’s producers.

There was a good example shown here in the UK recently. It was an American programme, but they were showing footage recorded by a UK police-force helicopter. It was hilarious. We were to believe that the helicopter pilot had gone to the New York drama school of mockney English accents, that UK police cars still rush around with sirens last heard on 1970s episodes of “The Professionals”, and that Big Ben can be heard striking in the background in Oxford.

Those of us who monitor police and Fire/EMS on scanners have the wireless mic frequencies programmed in, often around ~160MHz. It’s considered a pretty good scanner day when we hear one nearby traffic stop. The transmitter power is very, very low and a range of 2 blocks would be exceptional.

The technical quality on these shows is laughably bad, especially the sound effects (sirens, screeching tires, etc.) that get dubbed in. The worst part is the voice-over play-by-play that I suppose the viewers is supposed to think is coming from a guy in a helicopter. If you listen closely, you may notice they use the same voice over actors for all of the different incidents, despite the fact that they happen in differnt cities

What’s interesting about these shows is how heavily edited they are. When they’re showing footage from a dash mounted camera, you can often see the timestamp. Wacth closely and you’ll notice that they are showing events to you out of order to increase the “dramatic tension,” and that often they show the same snippet of footage several times.

“This crook thought he could get away in a stolen vegetable truck, but now he’ll have plenty of time to toss salads, in jail!

I sometimes enjoy watching these shows, but holy cow do they have unreal editing! I think I know the guy you stole that from Bryan Ekers - he seems to be employed just to say random things every few minutes, like “Their trouble started when they decided to run from the law.”.

I know I’m watching that show when they show helicopter footage from way overhead, and yet the soundtrack is full of sirens and (whenever the cars go over 3 kph), wildly screeching tires.

Police Video Camera manufacturer’s link so I qualify for GQ’ness

Stole?! I am begging of your pardon. It’s a original parody of the pithy post-arrest comments offered by John Bunnell, host of “World’s Wildest Police Videos”.

Best of all, the tire-screech sound normal even when the clip is show in slow-motion!

Ah, sorry. You’re saying he never actually said that? :wink:

Well, if you’re not at work, I suggest you do a google search on: “tossing the salad” +prison