Imagine this. You’re a large police force for a major metropolitan city. You investigate thousands of cases a year. In these investigations, officers and investigators collect mountains of evidence. Someone must keep track of all that evidence and the pressure from the public, the accused and the victims to come to conclusions in a case is overwhelming. Meanwhile, officer attrition is at an all-time high, officer mental health is of significant concern and your budgets are being cut. Paints a bleak picture, doesn’t it? OpenText™ understands the challenges you face and can help you make the world a safer, more secure place by finding the truth in data.
More than 80% of the evidence collected in an investigation is now in a digital form, creating a significant challenge for public safety officials as they grapple with the most effective ways to conduct digital evidence management. Large amounts of digital evidence are typically stored in disparate, stand-alone systems, making it difficult and time consuming for investigators, law enforcement officials, attorneys or judges to access the evidence. Meanwhile, the rapidly increasing volume of digital evidence is driving up the cost of resolving cases, increasing case resolution times and decreasing case closure rates. As public safety budgets continue to be under pressure and case backlogs increase, justice system collaborators need a solution that reduces their costs and improves their efficiency.
OpenText is pleased to announce a solution that helps solve the evidence management challenges faced by law enforcement and those in the criminal justice system. Digital Evidence Center by OpenText is a digital evidence management solution (DEM) that combines complete evidence chain of custody with evidence ingestion, storage, search, analysis, and reporting capabilities, delivering collaborative case management of rich-media evidence, forensic evidence, and document evidence.
Digital Evidence Center oversees evidence throughout its lifecycle including collection and submission, intake and storage, transfer and disposal. It enables authorized investigative personnel to enter evidence, move and transfer evidence, collaboratively review and edit records, and print reports, all with the goal of facilitating communication between public safety officials. Always top of mind with OpenText Digital Evidence Center is chain of custody, which is guaranteed throughout the collaboration process by ensuring the original evidence is never altered.
Authorized parties with access to the OpenText Digital Evidence Center can be within a single policing organization, across state, local and federal organizations and boundaries, and even across international borders. Evidence can be collected from the public, police officers, investigators and call centers, managed in the OpenText Digital Evidence Center and accessed by and distributed to the public, lawyers, court systems and government officials as is legally appropriate and/ or permissible. The goal is for appropriate parties to have collaborative access to any relevant evidence, allowing them to close their cases faster, bring offenders to justice more quickly and increase their investigative productivity and efficiency.
With OpenText Digital Evidence Center, public safety officials can expand their evidence management capabilities and reduce the strain on resources. OpenText Digital Evidence Center delivers features entered around case acceleration and document, media and evidence management, all aimed at helping law enforcement manage the scale and complexity of evidence in modern policing environments.
OpenText Digital Evidence Center offers a variety of deployment models optimized to meet user requirements. For public safety entities with a traditional IT model, OpenText Digital Evidence Center can be deployed as an on-premise solution. To address the growing law enforcement need for the computing, storage, information accessibility, security, efficiency, scalability and cost effectiveness benefits associated with the cloud, OpenText Digital Evidence Center is also available as either a cloud or hybrid model.
Recognized by Gartner, Forrester Research and SC Magazine as a leader in digital process automation, content services and forensic evidence processing for more than a decade, OpenText Digital Evidence Center delivers evidence management capabilities that are second to none. OpenText Digital Evidence Center streamlines the entire evidence management process, improves the efficiency of investigations and case resolution, reduces costs and eliminates risk by delivering an integrated solution from a single, trusted partner with nearly 30 years of experience in information management.
For more information, visit our digital evidence management solution page at security.opentext.com.