DMV California has large a team of field investigators that conduct investigations and collect superfluous evidence, stored and managed loosely on local drives, e.g. CDs and thumb drives, in each office all over the state. It takes too much effort to categorize, label and make that evidence searchable. This hinders collaboration among field investigators, especially when the collaboration is between counties and cities.
Using VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System, DMV stores and manages evidence collected through dashcams, bodycams and CCTV cameras in a central repository that can then be shared with anyone within the entire DMV organization across the state of California. Field investigators now spend more time on the field and less time in offices. Internal Affairs can now easily maintain chain of custody and use role-based access control to maintain admissibility of evidence in the court of law.
Customer Challenges
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles had locally stored evidence files for field investigations with no centralized repository. Searching, labeling and categorizing copious amounts of disparate digital evidence to manage and retrieve relevant evidence was a serious pain.
It was difficult to share or access digital evidence from other offices, with officers storing evidence on local drives; offices had to retrieve or get evidence shipped from other offices, which diverted time and effort away from other operations and hindered collaboration for investigations between cities or counties.
Furthermore, the field investigators don’t have the rights to view the evidence collected by internal affairs, while internal affairs audits the evidence collected by the field investigators. They struggled to maintain a clear, transparent chain of custody and maintain the privacy of the evidence.
Partner Solution
VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System leverages Azure Government Cloud and media services to provide a CJIS compliant solution that helped solve evidence management challenges. Automatic transcription allows searchability within videos based on what’s being said, also making the solution 508 compliant.
DMV also uses VIDIZMO’s out-of-the-box role-based access control (RBAC) to restrict unauthorized personnel from accessing confidential content. They use VIDIZMO’s chain of custody to maintain credibility of the evidence, and arranged their digital evidence files in case folders, tags and meta data to make the files easier more discoverable later.
VIDIZMO provided a customizable portal for Internal Affairs to have their separate workflows, logs and security policies.