IF DETECTIVE Kert Wilson knows your face and not your name, that's probably not a good thing.
It's not that he's bad with names - he just sees a lot of faces and most of them are up to no good.
As the first surveillance video-extraction guru for Southwest Detectives, Wilson has pored over hundreds of hours of surveillance footage, extracting it from machines that store owners don't know how to use and converting it to clips that can be distributed by news outlets and through social media.
The video of the irate customer who threw a cup of hot coffee on a Fresh Donuts worker - that was Wilson's work.
Outside of the victim and the perpetrator, often, Wilson is the first one to see just how a crime occurred.
"Sometimes you watch it and it's like, 'Holy cow, I can't believe I'm seeing the crime!' " he said. "It's amazing we're seeing this in real life because you usually just hear the person talking about it."
According to police spokesman Cpl. Frank Domizio, if police release video surveillance of a suspect with no other leads, there is a one in three chance of getting an arrest on the video alone.
"Frankly, a lot of those crimes would not have been solved otherwise," Domizio said. "If you can identify with the victim in the crime, I think people are more likely to get involved."
While the victims' faces are often blurred out in the production process to protect their identities, Wilson sees their faces - and he never forgets them.
"I get to watch these videos. I can see what it does to the person," he said. "It's traumatic that these things happen. If you're a stationary target like a store owner or what have you, every person you see walk in the store is now a potential bad guy to you."
Each detective division within the department has at least one video-extraction expert and there are about 50 investigators trained in video extraction across the city, Domizio said.
A fundamental skill needed for the job is patience, according to Wilson.
"Sometimes, it's taken me up to six hours just to get the video off of the system," he said. "I have a pretty good level of patience, and I'm tenacious. I'm going to get it; it may just take me a long time to get it."
Often, Wilson said, he'll walk in the back door of Southwest Detectives and realize one of the stars of his videos was caught when he recognizes his face in a holding cell.
"I'm like, 'Wha! Hey! I know you! I've been looking at your face for the last week,' " Wilson said. "More times than I can count, that's happened. Sometimes people get mad."
" @FarFarrAway
Blog: PhillyConfidential.com
