NICE has enhanced its NICE Investigate Digital Evidence Management Solution (DEMS) with a mobile app to help police officers and detectives streamline investigative work and save time while improving community engagement and incident response.
Running on the secure Microsoft Azure Government cloud, NICE Investigate is a one-stop solution for automating manual processes around digital evidence collection, management, analysis and sharing. With the release of NICE Investigate Mobile, NICE is extending these essential capabilities from the desktop to the smartphone, empowering police officers and investigators to work smarter and more efficiently from virtually any location. The ultra-secure mobile app supports two-factor authentication, permitting access by only authorized users and devices.
With NICE Investigate Mobile, officers and investigators can utilize their secure, department-issued smartphones to:
- Access and listen to emergency calls to more effectively respond to incidents. Today, the details of 911 and 999 calls are relayed to responding officers as second-hand information, but officers could glean far more insight and context if they had the ability to hear the actual call. With NICE Investigate Mobile, police officers dispatched to a high priority call (for example a domestic violence incident) are able to log on to the mobile app, and simply click on the incident number to play back the emergency call. Additionally, evidence or incident information collected by a dispatcher or crime center (such as suspect photos or video) can be uploaded to the Investigate case file for access via the mobile app.
- Capture and securely upload digital evidence from the scene. Police officers and detectives are typically first on-scene to an accident, incident or crime. Now, they can use the mobile app to instantly record and upload photos, video clips, and witness statements to NICE Investigate's electronic case folders, making that information immediately accessible to other investigators and officers. The process retains valuable metadata and ensures chain of custody, while also eliminating manual steps that consume resources and time. This also jump-starts the case building process, which can lead to faster charging decisions and safer communities.
- Improve citizen and community engagement in crime-fighting. In the wake of a crime, officers often must go door-to-door to canvas for CCTV footage. But the legwork doesn't stop there. They often need to copy video footage onto CDs and then hand deliver it to a specialist to make it playable. This arduous, multi-step process can eat up hours of an officer's time. In contrast, with NICE Investigate Mobile, officers can instantly pull up a list of cameras within a specific incident radius, and send off a request to registered businesses, community groups, and homeowners asking them to upload their video footage. All uploaded video is automatically transcoded to a useable format and immediately thereafter made available for viewing. Officers can also use NICE Investigate Mobile to text or email a secure link to witnesses of a crime, accident or incident, so they can upload photos or videos related to the case.
