Alabama taps NICE to accelerate justice process
ALABAMA, UNITED STATES — Alabama’s Shelby County has hired software firm NICE to update its digital evidence management systems.
NICE will deploy Evidencentral, its cloud-based data management platform, to help Shelby County’s public Safety and Justice arms shift from manual to automated processes to speed up investigations and prosecutions.
Shelby County Sheriff John Samaniego pointed to the surge of digital evidence over the past few years, which includes video footage from phone cameras, police body cameras, dashcams, and interview rooms.
These significant pieces of evidence used to be stored in flash drives, compact discs, and other mediums vulnerable to data corruption, malware, security breaches, and nefarious cyber infections. These dated storage methods delayed or outright crippled the justice process.
“Evidencentral’s cloud-based platform and automated workflows are going to streamline the entire case building process for investigators because they’ll be able to manage all of their digital evidence, more efficiently, in one place,” Samaniego noted.
Through Evidencentral, videos with varying formats will be transcoded into a unified configuration, accelerating the documentation process.
The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office and the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office team up to process thousands of cases annually. Evidencentral will aid the institutions by automatically collecting digital evidence from connected databases.
Shelby County District Attorney Matt Casey added: “Evidencentral’s ability to put evidence into context on timelines and maps will be especially helpful in preparing for trial and presenting cases to juries. Beyond helping us do everything faster, Evidencentral has the potential to change the caliber of our prosecutions too.”