Night vision technology has come a long way. The days of muddy, no-depth imaging offered by clunky contraptions at prices only the military could afford are gone. Today’s night vision offers crisp resolution, huge depth of field and options such as video and audio recording, all at a fraction of what it would have cost a decade ago.
You ask: But does law enforcement really need night vision?
Consider the following hypotheticals.
- A fleeing suspect disappears into a heavily wooded park at night. Pursuing officers, realizing the danger of pursuit, withdraw and radio for support. Arriving officers bring night-vision binoculars. The suspect is spotted through the darkness—without being able to see the officers watching him—lying in wait, a gun in hand.
- A young girl goes missing from a campground. Her parents call 9-1-1. A unit with a night vision monocular is dispatched to the scene and LEOs are able to discern her heat pattern through thick brush and rescue her.
According to Khyber Interactive Associates president Wes Doss, most of what police do is in compromised-light environments. Having a tool to see in the dark just makes sense—consider uses for SWAT call outs, investigations, special events details—especially at the prices and quality of today’s technology. The money saved in personnel time, officer safety and enhanced public safety make it a worthy investment for most departments these days.
What Is Night Vision?
Night vision is a generic term that describes an array of technologies that can be used in conjunction or separately to improve vision in low- and no-light environments. These technologies break down into three categories, roughly speaking: thermal imaging and light amplification.
Thermal imaging uses the infrared radiation that is created by heat to create an image. Simply put: Everything in a field of vision exist at slightly different temperatures. A thermal imager uses this temperature differential to create an image that is discernable even in no-light situations.
Thermal imaging is a great tool for law enforcement because so much of what LEOs do involves looking for people, animals, recently run cars and other objects that, at night will show brightly in the image, brining officers attention immediately to what matters.
Light amplification takes the ambient light that is usually present at night and makes it brighter. It’s a complicated business, but basically the unit takes in low-light—from stars, nearby lights, the moon, etc.—and multiplies the photons in a tube to create an image that looks much brighter than it actually is.
What’s nice about light amplification is that it presents all that’s there, and the images created by today’s technology are vastly improved from the green sludge you might have seen in the past. Proprietary digital filters can make images quite deep and striking in their detail.
(There are also infrared-illuminated cameras that broadcast an invisible, to the eye, beam and then use this light to create an image. These are often inexpensive but they suffer from situations where that light may be reflected back at the unit and the images created aren’t as clear as thermal imagers or light amplifiers.)
Test Before You Buy
Every reputable manufacturer of night vision technology will let you test out their equipment. This is good, because although most manufacturers will tout certain numbers, like pixel resolution and line pairs per mm (LP/mm), what really matters is the whole package. For example, light amplification is usually sold as Generation 2 or Generation 3. This refers to the version of tube used in the device, G3 being more powerful (and probably more suited for law enforcement applications). But also important is the quality of the lens being used, so you need to take the whole package into consideration—and this means testing it hands on.
Ask yourself: How will your cops use it? Also, while you have the manufacturer’s attention, ask about free training for the troops. This will go a long way in getting these units used in the field.
A friend of mine says that technology needs to be as simple to use as a vacuum cleaner if cops are going to use it. The good news is that these newer night vision devices are built tough and simple to use. That said, these aren’t cheap so have your staff properly instructed in the care of them. They must be ready to go when you need them and must be handled accordingly.
(For an excellent thermal-image monocular review by our own Chris Boyd, click here.)
Conclusion
There was a time when justifying night vision for law enforcement was nearly impossible. But that time is past. Moreover, with the high number of veterans in agencies today, who might have been accustomed to this technology in Iraq or Afghanistan, the uptake is often speedy.
Check your options, test them thoroughly and then use them. With proper use, night vision will repay the effort and then some.