Digital evidence is essential to modern-day criminal investigations and prosecutions, but also replete with challenges. The manual methods used for collecting, analyzing and sharing digital evidence can weigh down attorneys and office staff. But trailblazing criminal justice agencies, like the Office of the Genesee County Prosecuting Attorney, have found creative workarounds to ensure growing digital evidence doesn’t get in the way of timely justice.
Under the oversight of Prosecuting Attorney David Leyton, the Genesee County agency has the formidable responsibility of prosecuting violations of State criminal law in the County of Genesee. As the fifth most populous county in Michigan, Genesee is home to just under a half-million residents. Situated about an hour north of Detroit, the County’s population center is Flint (the birthplace of General Motors), although 33 other cities, townships and villages are also encompassed in its 637-square-mile area.
The Felony Trial division of the Prosecutor's office is located in the historic Genesee County Circuit Courthouse Building in downtown Flint. This division oversees all adult felony cases that continue from the District Court phase. The Office (which employs 46 prosecutors) reviews 5,000 requests for charges a year, and on top of those case submissions, also receives requests to review warrants and consult on cases.
“We are a resource-challenged department,” said Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Tamara Phillips. “We are one of the busiest prosecutor's offices in the United States.”
The caseloads require staff members to interact extensively with digital evidence, and that digital evidence is growing by the day.
Phillips elaborates: “When I started as an intern here back in the late 1990s, if an officer submitted a warrant request for charges, for example for resisting and obstructing a police officer, initiating a case was easy. I'd read a police report that was maybe a page long, and write the charges. Today, I might have cruiser cam and body-worn video to watch, a 911 recording to listen to, and even more video and audio if there are multiple responding officers. And that doesn’t even touch on other digital evidence. It can be absolutely overwhelming, and our outdated technical infrastructure and varying technical skill levels can compound the problem.”
Having to navigate the growing volumes of digital evidence using manual, physical processes can have negative consequences.
“The hold back of still being so connected to the physical world can certainly slow us down,” added Phillips. “No one wants to have to explain to a victim, a victim's family, a defendant's family, a judge, the media, why everything is taking so long. Then again, the pressure to move faster can be an enemy to justice because something is going to get missed. It's easy to shortcut if you're serving the clock instead of serving the scales of justice.”
But moving forward, with its deployment of NiCE Justice, the Office will be able to leverage growing digital evidence to serve the cause of justice, more efficiently and effectively.
Phillips credits Prosecutor Leyton with the digital transformation: “He worked very hard to lobby to obtain some significant state funding for Michigan prosecutors, which in part enabled us to double our staff, beef up our paralegal ranks, and implement NiCE Justice.”
The Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office has the distinction of being the first prosecutor’s office in Michigan to deploy NiCE Justice.
One of the AI-powered solutions in NiCE’s Evidencentral platform, NiCE Justice digitally transforms how prosecutors' offices receive, interact with, manage and share digital evidence. Freed from dealing with discs, drives, emails, and logging into multiple systems to manage and prepare evidence, attorneys and staff are able to focus more time, resources and attention on building and presenting compelling cases. NiCE Justice also features built-in AI and automation capabilities for object detection, automated case building, video and audio transcription and translation, optical character recognition (OCR), analytics and finding evidence connections. Additionally, NiCE Justice enables customizable retention of case evidence in a cloud-based solution that is both scalable and secure.
Streamlined Justice Begins with Efficient Evidence Intake
The Genesee County Prosecutor’s Office takes in evidence from 26 different municipalities, as well as the state police, the sheriff's department, and federal agencies, through a portal to the Office’s case management system. However, not all of the digital evidence can be submitted through the portal due to file size limitations, so paralegals also need to log into external systems to manually download evidence, which in turn then needs to be manually uploaded into case files.
Even more problematic, especially large files, like cell phone extractions, need to be copied onto CDs or hard drives and physically transported from the respective agencies to the Prosecutor’s Office, and manually uploaded. Securing 911 recordings for cases requires regular trips back and forth as well.
If multiple co-defendants are involved in a case, evidence must be uploaded into and maintained in separate case files, requiring duplicate effort and work.
Uploading certain types of digital evidence items, such as videos, can quickly eat up network bandwidth. And it’s a double-edged sword, because once video is uploaded, attorneys often need to download it back onto their desktops to view it, and that process can take hours.
“Everything takes too much time,” said Phillips. “Video uploads can take multiple tries, and downloads can fail out mid-stream as well. Also it takes too long to review videos because we need to download them first in order to watch them. Depending upon the video’s format, we might be able to watch it in our case management environment. But we often encounter buffering issues.”
Additionally, some proprietary videos can’t be played without summoning support from IT, because they didn’t arrive at the Office with the correct video player. About nine-five percent of the videos received from one local law enforcement partner, for example, can’t be immediately opened and played.
NiCE Justice simplifies and streamlines evidence intake by providing a single, secure online portal for law enforcement agencies to share all digital evidence. Because evidence is stored in the cloud, and in the same place where attorneys have tools at their disposal to work with the evidence, NiCE Justice also eliminates the need to continuously move evidence around via uploading and downloading. Additionally, all digital evidence files, regardless of size, can be submitted electronically and ingested into NiCE Justice via the portal. For example, cell phone extractions are treated as objects with no file size limitations or sharing constraints.
The system will also be set up to automatically ingest body-worn camera video (BWC) from multiple large police and sheriff’s departments, eliminating the need for paralegals to log into each BWC system and pull it manually. Finally, in the event that multiple co-defendants are charged in a related crime, staffers will be able to copy evidence from one case to another without re-uploading it.
NiCE Justice also integrates seamlessly with Genesee’s case management solution (PROSECUTORByKarpel - PbK) to consolidate and synchronize digital evidence and data across both systems bi-directionally, ensuring that complete evidence is always accessible, no matter what system prosecutors opt to work in. All uploaded evidence is automatically organized in NiCE Justice digital case folders in the cloud and cross-linked to the case management system.
Additionally, with NiCE Justice, playing videos is never a problem. All videos are automatically converted to a universally playable format during the upload process, and can be accessed and played within the NiCE Justice application in the cloud, eliminating the need to download files in order to play them.
Empowering Genesee County Prosecutors and Staff with Time-saving Tools
NiCE Justice will also equip Genesee County prosecutors and staff with time-saving tools to work with digital evidence efficiently. One such capability is AI-powered transcription.
“We were struggling with paying for transcripts of police interviews and other types of digital evidence that we might want to transcribe,” said Phillips. “And that was before the state tripled the rate to have a certified court reporter do transcriptions.”
NiCE Justice’s built-in AI-powered transcription can transcribe audio or video files in minutes, without the need for specialized software, costly outside resources, or long turnaround times. It can provide accurate, timely transcriptions for all types of recorded content (including body-worn and CCTV video, interview room recordings, 911 audio recordings, and more) in hundreds of languages.
Once a transcription is completed it is automatically deposited into the appropriate digital case folder and available for attorney viewing, alongside an embedded audio or video player. Transcriptions are easily searchable too (using for example, names, addresses, or other search criteria).
NiCE Justice also simplifies evidence redaction which is welcome news to Genesee County given that staff spends an estimated 10 to 15 hours per week redacting evidence, before that evidence can be sent out to defense attorneys.
In Michigan, Law Enforcement Information Network (LEIN) information not associated with the defendant must be redacted from documents shared with the defense. Additionally, to protect witnesses and victims, protected personal identifying information (PII) must be reviewed and redacted where appropriate. But before they can even work with evidence to redact it, office staff needs to download the files from the case management system. Only then can the tedious, time-consuming process of redaction start.
“Our paralegals have been using Camtasia to do a lot of the redacting of videos, which, of course, having to be done in real time, isn’t necessarily the most efficient way,” Phillips explained.
Thanks to the NiCE Justice’s indexing of digital evidence, and the power of AI, a prosecutor preparing evidence for discovery will be able to simply key in a search term (word or words) once, to redact that information from every piece of evidence collected in the case (e.g., documents, reports, audio, and video). For example, if a minor is involved (as a witness or a victim), the individual’s name could be removed from every piece of evidence. Redacted versions of evidence are stored as variants, while the NiCE Justice solution also preserves the original.
NiCE Justice can also leverage the intelligence of AI to automate the recognition of personally identifiable information (for example phone numbers, social security numbers, names, etc.), absent specific direction from a human. It can then provide reference points to instances where it found the PII, which can be quickly reviewed and validated by a human.
NiCE Justice also uses AI to automate the redaction of faces and/or objects from videos. A prosecutor simply tags a face (or other sensitive material) to redact, and the software automatically finds, tracks and blurs the tagged face or object throughout the entirety of the video.
Additionally, NiCE Justice will help Genesee County prosecutors save time during trial preparation by providing built-in tools for creating video clips, preparing trial exhibits, and assembling digital evidence on timelines or maps.
Phillips sees the ability to give digital evidence context as tremendously beneficial.
“I see a lot of capability for myself or my trial-assigned prosecutors who, for example, might be working an officer-involved shooting, or a fleeing and eluding case, involving lots of police cars, and multiple jurisdictions. The ability to link and sequence body cam video, dash cam video, and 911 dispatch communications, will enable us to create a digital montage that would be immensely powerful to a jury.”
With NiCE Justice, discovery with defense is also streamlined through a fully digital, trackable process. Instead of sharing digital evidence via multiple links (and sharing larger phone dump files on removable media), office staff will now be able to share all digital evidence in one secure email link. An audit trail will then automatically track when evidence was received and opened.
“On the due process and fairness front, it’s our responsibility to get digital evidence to the defense in a timely and complete manner, so they have everything they need before trial,” added Phillips. “Now we’ll have the ability to do that in a manner where we’ll have actual machine data output that says this is what was provided and when.”
According to Phillips, the process of digitally transforming how the Genesee County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office manages growing digital evidence will have far-reaching benefits.
“Our duty as public prosecutors is not to win convictions; it's to serve justice. And serving justice isn't something that just happens in our Office. It's connected to the community. Technically, our Office is making the investment in NiCE Justice, but this is going to make evidence management easier for everyone – our law enforcement agencies, and also our county public defenders. It’s going to improve our entire criminal justice system.”
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