Every day, law enforcement professionals put their lives on the line to protect and serve the communities in which they live and work. They need and deserve the best tools that technology has to offer.

With the advent of digital media (e.g.: photo, audio, video, and document files) the ability of public safety organizations to document evidence has greatly expanded and enhanced. The availability and affordability of digital cameras, while improving the quality and quantity of crime scene photographs also allows photographers to shoot indiscriminately, creating large volumes of digital imagery. Add Video Surveillance, TASER Cams, In-Car Cameras, Pole Cams and other sources and Law Enforcement has a huge store of images to manage.

Agencies are spending expensive forensic time focused on managing technology, data duplication and securing storage of digital evidence. Ensuring the integrity of the data (no tampering or alteration) and enabling police to secure images in a repository so they can’t be accessed by unauthorized staff including full audit capabilities for every image and action taken is the need of the hour. Managing digital evidence properly is not a luxury; it is an imperative that protects officers, the community and the justice system.

Law enforcement agencies need a secure open platform for comprehensive management of virtually any form of digital evidence that moving forward, which is both scalable and modular, providing departments of all sizes the flexibility needed to work with future mandates, new evidence formats and budget fluctuations. Ensuring a full chain-of-custody audit trail maintaining evidentiary requirements at all times.

Solutions

Anticipating and addressing changing trends in evidence collection and management allows us to help our clients leverage the power of technology without the steep learning curve, keeping them focused on their jobs instead.

Unisys has developed a highly secure solution to meet forensic integrity standards and policy requirements of several of the largest police departments in the world. The secure storage of images and other multimedia content occurs in a tamperproof information archive, in effect, a digital evidence vault.

Secure Image Management System (SIMS) technology uses advanced digital facial recognition technology to provide law enforcement agencies with a 'digital vault' of stills and video data, the uses for which extend into the most gruesome aspects of law enforcement. These include the identification of deceased victims from tattoos or even from a decapitated head.

Developed using Microsoft Silverlight, Unisys SIMS solution is a suite of products that permits the distribution, management and processing of images and multimedia in enterprise environments.

Any law enforcement agency, can implement SIMS to upload digital images from any source and securely archive the original in a digital vault. Police can then attach metadata tags – such as case number, photograph time and date, photographer name – to a working copy of the image to enable easy retrieval. Once the original image is uploaded, it can’t be modified or deleted. To ensure forensic integrity, the system tracks changes during every step.

SIMS also supports digital videos in a wide variety of formats. To make it easier for investigators to use the video footage, it is passed through a transcoding engine that converts it into a common, easily accessible format.

Unisys integrates SIMS with operational policing and other law enforcement systems using an Enterprise Services Bus. It runs on the Microsoft Windows Server platform, whilst the principles of clustering and redundancy have been used in designing the solution, enabling load sharing and fail-over.

At Unisys, our commitment to the law enforcement community drives everything we do. Working together, we help build a better society, promote the rule of law, advance the cause of justice, keep the peace and, ultimately, save lives.