Kinesense Digital Evidence Management (DEM) solution for police is designed to make asset and especially video evidence management even easier.

The digitalisation of evidence is on every police force’s agenda, but when implementing a new digital policing solution, you always have to look at the big question; What is the Return on Investment (ROI)?

When we think about the return on investment, we all have 2 main questions in mind:

  1. “Are we happy with the status quo or do we need to change?”
  2. “how much money will I save if I change my workflow?”

There are a plethora of reasons to adopt a digital asset system, from speeding up bail/charging decisions to better collaboration but we are going to take a closer look at some of the cashable savings.

Let’s take a closer look at some key issues that are associated with the traditional evidence management workflow and how Kinesense DEM helps in getting the maximum ROI.

 

Eliminate the use of physical evidence such as USB sticks, CD and other physical devices:

 

  • Collecting and collating evidence is a major problem to be tackled by the police. At the best of times, it is difficult to physically transfer evidence from one point to the next. Most of the time transfer of evidence is done using disks or encrypted USBs. Nearly every police officer can lament there is “Not enough encrypted USB sticks to go around”.
  • Not only do officers have to contend with a lack of supply of media, but they must also ensure all chain of evidence protocols are undertaken including bagging and tagging media. It’s an arduous process at the best of times.
  • Kinesense DEM enables officers or organisations, regardless of their geographic location, to seamlessly collaborate; sharing any assets such as photos, CCTV and body-worn video, interview recordings, documents, etc.; basically everything that you would normally see in an investigation, without the need to take USBs and DVDs or even paper documents out of the office.
  • If you consider that a USB can cost between € 6-20 (encrypted ones cost more), It’s quick to see how much you can save. One UK force estimated that they could eliminate €60,000 alone from their budget by cutting down on USB device purchase. So, ask your procurement office what your annual USB bill is and know that you can eliminate this easily with the adoption of a DEM.

 

Eliminate the cost of physical transfer of evidence

 

  • Evidence and assets collection takes place on a daily basis across the force. Typically evidence is obtained from the scene of the crime, a witness or an external partner such as a Local Authority CCTV control room and to get it, someone has to physically get in a car and travel to different places to collect it. It would not be unrealistic for a medium-sized force to take 20,000 separate journeys over a 12-month period, just picking up DVDs and USB sticks containing evidential material.
  • If we assume on average that each trip could take 1.5 hours, 20,000 trips a year would equate to 30,000 hours of officers’ time and depend on the geographic location that could cost the force as much as € 900,000, without even taking into consideration the travel costs of fuel and transport. Eliminating this unnecessary expenditure would be the equivalent of giving a force back more than 20 additional officers.
  • As Kinesense DEM is a web-based solution, it enables officers, trusted partners or even the general public (via a special portal) to upload evidence directly. It can be accessed from a desktop PC/Mac, laptop, tablet or mobile device making assets and evidence collection easier.

 

Cutting down on storage costs

  • The storage of evidence is one of the biggest police burdens especially when you consider the traditional working practices of storing a master and making three working copies to share out on DVDs. Storing of CCTV evidence is particularly arduous. It can involve multiple days’ worth of footage, which ultimately takes up a huge amount of your storage compared to other digital assets, such as audio, photos, or documents.
  • Firstly, by adopting a DEM you can eliminate some of those working copies as all you need is one centralised version stored securely. By adopting the Kinesense DEM you can make use of our extensive suite of video analytics to reduce the amount of video that you need to store. You can instantly search and extract only the relevant piece of evidence for your investigation, instead of having to store the complete evidence; significantly saving storage costs.
  • As an example, one UK force typically cuts 98% of the video they must upload through using Kinesense analytics. The storage cost saving alone would be €168,000. So, whilst you can get a lot of cashable savings from other DEMS too, savings of this magnitude can only be achieved by using the Kinesense product suite.

 

By implementing the Kinesense DEM across the force to reduce the number of man-hours wasted on physical transfer, the removable media costs associated with it and the force’s overall network storage costs, these three savings alone would potentially save a small force upwards of a quarter of a million euros a year, and significantly more for larger forces.

This would result in a Return on Investment many times over.