Tech companies partner to help agencies cut through digital evidence backlogs
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A new initiative aims to address workforce shortages among law enforcement agencies that impact their ability to efficiently manage digital evidence like body camera footage.
From drones to body cameras, law enforcement technology has rapidly advanced in recent years to increase departments’ surveillance and accountability capabilities. But with increasing approaches to capture police personnels’ interactions with the public comes a growing supply of digital evidence backlogs for authorities to grapple with.
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, for instance, reported last year that the agency had a backlog of 417 digital evidence testing requests, and they could take 12 to 18 months to complete.
A 2024 survey of digital forensic practitioners found that 23% of respondents reported that the time to clear evidence backlogs often exceeded six months and, in some cases, took more than four years. A separate survey released the same year also found that 50% of law enforcement personnel tasked with digital evidence extraction worked increased overtime hours due to growing backlogs, and 75% of investigators reported they spend an average of 45 hours reviewing data for each case.
Reviewing digital evidence manually is “labor-intensive and diverts already deteriorated staffing levels away from frontline investigative duties,” Jillian Snider, adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said in an email to Route Fifty.
A new initiative from two tech companies aims to address both the challenge of digital evidence backlogs and staffing shortages among agencies.
Veritone, an AI solutions provider, and Technology North, an assistive technology company, aim to collaborate with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to pair an AI-driven redaction tool and a neurodiverse workforce to more efficiently manage video and audio evidence, like completing redaction requests.
Neurodiversity refers to people who display brain and cognitive functions that vary from what are considered typical conditions, and includes diagnoses like autism spectrum disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia.
The partnership aims to help solve agencies’ business and operational challenges of backlogs, which can create time and financial burdens for resource-strapped agencies but also to help uplift communities and provide employment opportunities for neurodiverse people, said Ling Huang, CEO of Technology North.
Under the partnership, autistic staff of Technology North will collaborate with law enforcement agencies using AI to assist with digital evidence management tasks like reviewing body camera footage frame by frame to remove content that could infringe on the privacy of people not involved with the relevant case.
Huang also pointed to the potential of such partnerships helping to prepare law enforcement agencies to better interact with neurodiverse individuals when responding to emergency calls. Across the nation, for instance, concerns have been raised over police officers’ lack of training to properly deal with how neurodiverse people or people with disabilities communicate, which has, in some cases, led to wrongful arrests due to such misunderstandings.
“In the past few years, there have been real advancements in AI with tools that can streamline some of these challenges,” Snider said. Plus, “neurodiverse workers bring a unique and highly valuable set of cognitive strengths to tasks like digital evidence management, offering law enforcement agencies advantages in efficiency and innovation,” she explained.
For example, neurodiverse people “often possess heightened attention to detail, strong pattern recognition and an affinity for rule-based systems,” Snider said. “These are traits quite suited to managing large volumes of digital evidence, which require precision, consistency and persistence.”
Those characteristics, she explained, can be particularly helpful for police departments to reduce error rates and expedite data-processing tasks as they work to chip away at digital evidence backlogs.
Ultimately, Snider said leveraging AI and expanding inclusive workforce practices can produce “a direct and rewarding impact on investigative timelines and case clearances.”