Automate the Redaction of Digital Evidence to Save Valuable Resources

Law enforcement agencies (LEAs) are currently in a difficult position. There are demands from the public for law enforcement to be more transparent and new legislation across multiple states is requiring the rapid release of video evidence (sometimes as quickly as within 45 days). But in order to release this evidence, LEAs must go through the tedious, time-consuming process of redacting any personally identifiable information (PII) to protect the integrity of the investigation and those involved with the evidence.

While video evidence is invaluable to investigations, the volume of video evidence can present logistical problems, especially when LEAs need to perform manual redactions. 

There has been a huge rise in the use of video evidence. Now involved in an average 80% of crimes, video evidence can come from various sources, including smartphones and tablets, CCTV, private property or home security systems, and more. Additionally, body-worn cameras are becoming more and more of a standard across all agencies, with 60% of local police departments and nearly 50% of sheriffs’ offices utilizing fully deployed body-worn cameras.

As these numbers continue to grow across the nation, LEAs will need a solution that can help teams scale the growing volume of video evidence and redact PII so that they can release it to the public in a timely manner.  

To showcase the pressures that manual redaction efforts can place on LEAs, Eureka PD spoke with Veritone that their evidence technician, who focuses on digital evidence, must manually redact each video file individually—a time-consuming task that can take the technician a full eight-hour workday for a 10-minute video.

Veritone created Redact to address this rising issue of the resource-draining, manual redaction process. This AI-based redaction solution can dramatically accelerate the redaction process, allowing LEAs to free up more hours and attention to other important tasks without sacrificing accuracy or chain of command. 

There are other AI redaction solutions out in the market, but not all can truly offer the same speed and scaling abilities that Veritone Redact can. The Oregon Police Department used a top redaction software and Veritone Redact in a side-by-side competition to see which could redact a 10-minute bodycam video faster. The competing redaction software processed the video in 80 minutes, while Veritone Redact completed the task in 25 minutes. 

Veritone Redact has also fulfilled the needs of other police departments. Lake Stevens Police Department needed a CJIS-compliant solution and head detection. And, in a similar experience to Oregon PD, the Pasadena Police Department used Veritone Redact in a case that had more than 10 hours of video evidence. Veritone Redact’s ease of use, quick processing, synchronized audio transcriptions to video files, user-defined regions, and powerful collaborative capabilities were all reasons Pasadena PD decided to adopt the tool.

With the use of Veritone Redact, LEAs across the nation have leveraged the power of AI to reduce the amount of time and effort spent on redacting video evidence while easing the mental burden on their staff that accompanies viewing violent crime for hours on end. Veritone Redact also allows teams to accelerate their workflows, maintain compliance with laws and mandates such as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which reduces a backlog of public records requests, and frees up resources so that LEAs can better serve their communities while meeting the public’s demands of greater transparency.