Does your agency struggle with managing evidence?

Today, Digital Evidence Management Systems (DEMS) providers mainly support their own first party devices (e.g. dash cams and body-worn cameras) and support only a limited list of proprietary files captured from third party devices. However, the use of video recordings and multimedia in investigations has grown exponentially. This generates a need for new solutions to handle the increased size, complexity, and variety of data that bogs down traditional systems and workflows.

Agencies have been further motivated to find solutions to migrate their existing historical evidence in an affordable fashion for long-term management. Evidence currently stored on secondary devices such as VHS/LTO tape, CD/DVD/Blue-ray, thumb drives, obsolete hardware, end-of-life formats, are at the risk of physical damage from natural disasters need to be securely migrated.

Law Enforcement agencies need to protect and house their evidence for many years or “forever” as required by law. Digital evidence becomes increasingly difficult to retrieve and play back each year as playback devices become obsolete and/or incur physical damage. Enter Data-Central, a hybrid middleware tool that takes unstructured, disorganized data from multiple sources and puts this data into a structured environment within a database along with its metadata.

How Data-Central Works?

Data-Central is a hybrid middleware tool and a logical software system that comes with defined capabilities such as communication protocols, data transformation, mapping, and connectivity. Standardizing end-point connectivity of systems, applications and data integrations are made easy with Data-Central's APIs, effectively acting as an extension of your existing software.

From Data-Central’s software interface, users can select, review, and determine evidentiary value or if the file needs to be forensically enhanced (dark, blurry, etc.). Users can determine the desired workflow or automate the process via tagging (manually or automatically). The solution supports bidirectional communication with third party systems to support automated tagging with several types of metadata (i.e. descriptive, structural, administrative, and statistical). Data-Central also automatically extracts EXIF metadata and applies it to each file.

Data-Central (DC) takes unstructured, disorganized data from multiple sources, including, but not limited to:

• Cell Phones
• Security Cameras
• Body Cameras
• Transportation Safety Solutions
• Photos Documents
• Computer Forensic Dumps

...and puts it into a structured environment within a database along with its metadata. If there is proprietary video present, Data Central analyzes the files and converts them with a lossless process to MP4 files, retaining the originals and securing all the video with a court accepted Hash Process. The unstructured data is then categorized with its metadata, file-based information, environmental metadata, CAD or RMS data, as well as user based custom tags. All this information is now available in one interface, instead of multiple silos requiring custom applications.

With Data-Central's Case-Pak feature users can easily create an evidence package and securely share that information with other parties such as: LEAs, prosecutors, defense counsel members, and records management. 

Key Features of Data-Central

• Eliminates data silos and allows disparate systems to act as a single DEMS
• Integrates with existing DEMS and other asset management solutions
• Automated evidence/metadata extraction
• Move away from aging/obsolete secondary devices
• Allows migration from old systems
• Automates evidence extraction from third party systems
• Supports proprietary video (and other) file formats
• Provides direct client integration into VMS systems
• Storage agnostic – Cloud, On-Premise, or Hybrid

Contact us to learn more!