THE DETAILS

I’m a big fan of Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors. And I think of them as linked. The simplest explanations are preferable to and often more likely than highly complex ones and ignorance or incompetence tend to be far more common and probable an explanation than malice.

Besides these tending to offer the best or most likely explanations, thinking otherwise is probably just not going to do your mental health any good while also failing to get you anywhere. You, a mere mortal, are just not going to crack the code on the cabal of interdimensional, shape-shifting lizard-people who live in glass palaces within the hollowed-out Moon and from there predetermine the results of the World Cup and the global price of toothpaste.

That said, I do happily hold and nurse a whole bunch of what others would likely call conspiracy theories. I tend to reject that label as I don't think I ever see nor even propose any conspiracy. I mostly wind up at something like "Will someone, please, give me a explanation that makes some sense, please? Or even just something that accords with the last thing you insisted was true, please? Pretty please?" I seldom even get to reject any explanations, formal or informal, because serious offerings so rarely arrive.

But here’s one such holding being nursed. Tell me what you think.

THE CASE

This week folks have been once again talking about the Kirk assassination, likely because, almost a year later, the trial of the accused is set to begin. And in case you’re not aware, there were a whole spectrum of wild conspiracies that arrived the moment of the killing and that were collated, elaborated, and pushed out on the social media circuit and in online forums. I’ve looked into none of those, don’t know anything about Kirk or who he or his family, friends, and allies were, and know nothing about the shooter or ballistics or even about the state of Utah or the university where he was killed.

I didn’t seek out any information about this event but, like so often, instead had it delivered to me by the traditional media and day and night via all the channels they have access to. So, yes, with a couple of communication degrees, a general interest in the press and what they’re up to, and a personal curiosity around visual literacy, what we were given triggered an interest in a particular offering.

Almost immediately after the shooting the FBI arrested two people. One said he did it and the other the FBI apprehended someplace and claimed was their guy. FBI Director Patel even went on social media and triumphantly declared they got their man. A little weird but case-closed I presumed.

Then, hours later, investigators held a press conference with officials un-declaring their catch and asserting they, in fact, did not have their man nor did they identify a suspect. They did, however, insist they had "good video footage," "high quality" and were applying their state of the art facial recognition to it.

Sometime later that day the FBI returned to face the press and admit their facial recognition was unsuccessful. At this time they also released a pair of bad frames from their video (seemingly less than 1MP in resolution) of a person of interest to solicit help from the public.

The announcement and images struck me as odd. They just told us they had “good, high-definition video” but instead released low resolution frames where the suspect looks to be as far away from the camera as possible. He's clearly walking up the stairs and toward the camera but the image is taken from what must be the earliest point in the sequence. And then what was put on the internet for public review seems like it was blown up from very low resolution, only to deliver something grainy and full of obscuring artefacts. Pretty weird to my eye, especially because these were frames from campus surveillance camera footage: you know, intended solely for this purpose. Not only that but the footage was also captured at midday and in good lighting — nothing like being pulled from one second of footage in the distant and jerky background of someone’s TikTok video or enhanced from a reflection in the window of a speeding car captured by a traffic camera across the road... This was the closest thing imaginable to the criminal posing for headshots.

As I imagine everyone would, I assumed this was just what they had or only what could be delivered to the public (to preserve their investigation or conceal their methods or tools or for some other reason unknown to me.) Fine.

Eventually investigators announced they did, actually, for real this time, catch their suspect. With this reveal they also, weirdly, shared far higher resolution stills from seemingly the very same security cameras. (They're about 3000x2000 when I open the original off the news websites but are fairly grainy at that size so probably came off of a 2000x1000 capture, if I were to guess.) By this time they had apprehended the guy and so were sending out his mugshot, too. In this new footage, from what looks like the same stairwell and camera, the guy was right in front of the camera, not down at the bottom of the stairs, and it captured him from the front, side, and back, almost like what would've been moderately useful prior.

Unlike the first pictures on offer, ostensibly to aid in the identification of the guy, these images clearly showed the guy's shoes, the details of his hat of the print on his shirt, the style and make of his backpack, his hands, neck, and cheek, as well as his hair colour and his haircut from the profile and at the back. The pre- and post- were in pretty stark contrast.

Aside from the very significant difference in the content of these nearly identical images, pre- and post-arrest, I know enough about digital images, though probably no more than you, to know that they are not like wine or cheese and do not enhance in quality with time. And you simply cannot get a good image out of a bad one. All the smoothing and despeckling and after effects you can throw at a picture cannot take a low-resolution shot and magically transform it into a much larger and higher clarity one. Though you see this all the time in fiction, we don't live in the Blade Runner, Star Trek, or Enemy of the State universe, as far as I know, and so we lack those tools. Even with cutting-edge AI you can only get distortions of what is there, or more likely a total hallucinatory fabrication, with any bump up in size or attempt at clarifying. (And, sadly, we now do get a dump of these ridiculous false "clarification" images with every notable and mundane event.) Right. With known physics you can only go the other way: degrade the resolution from what the video or photo was initially captured at.

So, as far as I was concerned, everyone on the investigation side had all these details with which to solicit tips from the public. And they had additional details in the form of video, which would've given people everything hidden in the stills: how he carries himself and his walk, what his cadence was like and whether he had a limp or dragged his feet or seemed to be trying to conceal something on his person or hide his face, etc… I mean, who couldn't identify their sibling or spouse from their walk alone, even at 200 yards and merely from their silhouette? That's not what we got.

Making things even more interesting, it was not the surveillance footage released to the public or the "more than 11,000 tips" that came in as a result of this media exposure that led to the capture of the suspect; instead, the kid confessed to his family or a family friend (depending what story you read), they then reported him to the local sheriff, and he turned himself in, attempting to avoid a seemingly inevitable altercation with a SWAT team in his parents' living room.

Even more to my point, while the local, national, and international press published the first set of stills and also the later offerings, not once did I read or hear anyone ask why the garbage arrived in the first round and the better stuff only after capture. Too, we've just now gotten something possibly approximating the original video in the preliminary hearing for the pending case against the accused. And, in fact, not only do we see the same camera footage in far higher resolution (seemingly twice size and resolution of what the public got) and in far better lighting and with greater clarity as well, but, just as the news reports, we've also got a whole "mountain of surveillance footage" of the suspect from cameras all over campus, long before and long after the shooting. This is footage that surely campus security, the local police, and/or federal investigators would have had right from hour one and most certainly poured over immediately. The stills and video didn't emerge from bystander phones or in a dead drop to Wikileaks nor was it coaxed out of the public after a week of pleading from the press, law enforcement, government, or the family of the victim.

EXPLANATIONS

I talked to someone about this and they offered that the FBI either didn’t have a better quality image to start with or didn't want to compromise their ongoing investigation. I countered by noticing that the images were from the same source, that you can't get a better image out of a bad one, that they didn't release any of the relevant and clearly captured details, and that no one was obligated to release any images to the press at any point, before or after the arrest. (And I've argued many times that showing these people's faces and splashing their names everywhere does more harm than good, and that there seems to be consensus in the psychology, sociology, and criminology worlds about this... Meaning: I don't want anyone to have these images.) I also presumed that the poorer quality image lacking identifying details could only serve to yield a larger number of false positives from the public than otherwise, obviously making their already difficult job only harder. I noticed that the first image was little more than “guy in hat, sunglasses, and jeans” while the same low-quality still procured from a second or two later in the same video, a few steps up the stairs, could have given us, it seemed to me, at minimum the addition of the colour and style of his shoes, hat, and hair. A five second video clip would've only yielded more.

Of course no one needs all the internal details for why or how the first images came out, but if the reasons for this were technical, strategic and investigative, or pure incompetence then it seemed everyone would want to know; however, the question, as far as I am aware, was never even asked. If I was a reporter or running a newspaper or was on the police or university communication team, I would at least spell out the situation to the public.

So then was it just not possible for the FBI to access the raw footage on modern security cameras, or just this brand or these particular cameras maybe? If so, that seems like something that needs fixing. Or is it just company or industry policy that no one ever gets high-res or the same resolution investigators are working with? Maybe there's good reason for that. Fine. Seems like a problem. Maybe this is normal investigative procedure, said to be but not actually intended to solicit public assistance in identifying the suspect but only to signal to the criminal that they've been identified? Great. Fine. That doesn't make sense of what actually happened. Or is the issue that the intelligence community is hiring teenagers who don't know how to use computers or couldn't figure out how to transfer the image except to take a bad photo of a low resolution surveillance monitor? Another potential explanation needing rapid rectification, at least from where I'm sitting. Or maybe it was that every press outlet in the world simultaneously took it upon themselves to reduced the nice 6MP or 12MP still they were given down to 1MP or 0.1MP (and then also enlarge that up to 4X the size for their website and thereby introduce all kinds of noise, meaning there's no way to know if the smudge of pixels on the suspect's face was a tattoo, a scar, or just digital noise)? That seems like a weird problem and one that could and should see swift and easy remedy. There could, of course, be a hundred other explanations. Give me one that makes some sense or at least doesn't violate everything we know or have always safely assumed to be true or what you insisted took place.

Though preferable by far, I personally wouldn't forward the most obvious explanations, of stupidity or blunder, because delivering a short clip of a video takes more work than sending out a straight copy of the original; and, likewise, capturing and sending a lower quality still takes more work than an unaltered, full-frame screen capture — or, all the information and experience I have tells me that is so.

What's this simplest explanation? That it took them a perfectly normal amount of time, with normal human and technological powers, to spot the bad guy within their mountains of footage and then source all the videos with him in it? And their perfectly normal doorbell camera-like surveillance cameras capture a 1MP or 2MP feed because a minor university doesn't have a military-grade security budget or the ability to capture footage from many thousands of 4K cameras? Okay, except they delivered far higher resolution video (and from a random stairwell, not likely your best cameras, not in front of campus security or at the bank of cash machines in the student union building) and with that far more details with which to identify the suspect only after they caught the guy. So, what would William of Ockham say about that? Surely the simplest explanation can't reject what is known to be true.

MOTIVATIONS

As you can imagine, in response to this most tepid conversational push-back I was told I was a dangerous lunatic, a conspiracy theorist whose only aim could be to undermine the public's faith in the criminal justice system. I was told that I was struggling to conceal my psychotic proposal that it was actually the FBI who killed Kirk or that they were covering for the murderer, that I could never accept any of the simple and obvious explanations and preferred to live in a wild fantasy land. How cute.

I offered that none of the above was so. I said that, quite simply, if I or any friend or family member was killed or accused of something and the same sort of thing transpired it was unimaginable that I wouldn't perceive it the same way and wouldn't wish to understand what seems inconsistent with how the world works or the stated intentions of authorities. I needed no other motivation. And I certainly didn't feel I had proposed or was promoting a conspiracy or cover-up or suggesting there was a high-profile public execution by Trump's FBI of a key ally. I certainly wasn't encouraging anyone to lose what faith they have in the US justice system. None of that was at play as far as I could tell.

Further, not only did I have no political motivations or skin in the game nor any emotional connection to the case in any way but I wasn't even seeking to know anything other than that someone also noticed this and determined there was a good reason — even one I was never going to be privy to, either to preserve the case against the accused or for national security or anything else that is totally justifiable and we all understand and accept. But if, as my interlocutor was keen to do, everyone who looks at this wants to offer explanations that are impossible or seem extraordinarily unlikely then, yes, I am indeed going to have more questions.

Of course, I was told that none of that could actually be my motivation or interest and that I was not so secretly harbouring a desire for some sort of elaborate cover-up of a government-involved assassination plot and their trained assassin. Obviously. Though I didn't ask, how would this even work? I, a non-religious Canadian who has never voted to the right of the NDP, am secretly a Christian Conservative cheering on Kirk and Trump while pushing the idea that someone in the Trump administration or the agencies under his team are bumping off millennial Republicans and their key fundraisers and activists? Where does that get me... or anyone... or anything? Again, I'm not the one failing to make any damn sense.

Further still, it seems to me like this case is pretty open-and-shut. It appears to follow the trend of Leftist political violence we've seen in other attempted and completed street executions and the very sort of thing a certain kind of person online (and sitting in cafes and around their dining tables, on podcasts and in the CNN studio, or on the floor of the US Congress) openly expresses enthusiasm for.