Law enforcement agencies often prioritize the acquisition of hardware — including body cameras, drones and surveillance sensors — over the backend software infrastructure and applications that manage and make sense of the data these devices generate. It’s typically easier to budget for hardware as a one-time capital expense than to justify long-term software or data infrastructure investments.
Agencies tend to respond to rising crime, public pressure or major incidents by investing in tools they can quickly deploy. Unfortunately, without the proper software in place to store, index, distribute, redact, tag and retrieve the massive amounts of diverse data these sensors collect, systems become fragmented, which slows response times and data sharing. That can mean delays in investigations and difficulty retrieving evidence, as well as potential privacy violations, incomplete audit trails or evidence that’s inadmissible in court.
The solution, as law enforcement agencies are beginning to discover, is a modernized approach to digital evidence collection and management that prioritizes software and AI as the means to unlock the full value of hardware investments and the data they gather.
The U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) — a federal law enforcement agency that provides advanced investigative capabilities to U.S. Air Force commanders — is a prime example of this approach. AFOSI is implementing Veritone’s aiWARETM platform and Intelligent Digital Evidence Management System (iDEMS) to enhance and accelerate data analysis, allowing its investigators to quickly transform an ever-growing volume of text, audio, and video data into actionable insights.
Adopting an AI-Powered Approach
AFOSI’s perspective on prioritizing investment in backend software and data management breaks with the public sector’s tendency toward a hardware-first model. By providing AI-powered solutions tailored to mission-critical applications, Veritone continues to expand its role within law enforcement and defense, becoming a trusted partner for modernizing investigative workflows and increasing the number of crimes solved.
AFOSI is among a growing number of law enforcement and defense agencies increasingly turning to forensic and AI-powered software tools to manage digital evidence and enhance operational awareness. As mission areas become more complex and data-intensive, software platforms that can rapidly process and interpret information are becoming essential complements to hardware-based systems. Agencies relying solely on hardware may face challenges that platforms like Veritone iDEMS are specifically designed to overcome.
Challenges of Solely Hardware-Focused Approaches
For example, as of 2023, the Philadelphia Police Department had spent over $20 million on its body-worn camera program, according to a July 2023 report by Axios.1 Despite more than 3,000 officers generating hundreds of thousands of hours of footage annually, most of it went largely unreviewed, raising concerns about oversight and effectiveness.
A January 2024 report from the Police Executive Research Forum2 and similar studies have explored the ongoing issue of agencies collecting more bodycam footage than they can realistically manage — and how AI-powered tools can help address the resulting backlog. Success stories from the U.S. and internationally suggest a more holistic approach — combining advanced software with bodycam hardware — is key to unlocking the value of this unstructured data.
Successful Software-First Approaches in Policing
In 2020, Ireland’s An Garda Síochána spent €30,855 (about $35,000 USD)3 on what it described as an “investigative intelligence platform,” reflecting its view that advanced data analysis is essential to modern policing. In the U.S., the NYPD partnered with Microsoft to develop the Domain Awareness System (DAS),4 one of the world’s most comprehensive surveillance and data analytics platforms.
Similarly, the Albuquerque Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) brings together digital evidence from surveillance systems and databases into a unified interface, enabling better visualization and faster response times.
Veritone’s Scalable and Secure AI Solutions for Law Enforcement
Veritone’s iDEMS suite offers AFOSI these capabilities and a multitude of others, delivering an AI-powered approach to unlocking data from disparate hardware platforms. Veritone’s open approach ensures its software seamlessly integrates with existing and potentially diverse infrastructures, enhancing functionalities from search to timeline-building to evidence-sharing between case teams as an all-in-one tool.
Keeping national security interests and privacy standards top of mind, Veritone’s aiWARE operating system securely orchestrates hundreds of cognitive and generative AI models on AWS CJIS-compliant Commercial Cloud, enabling federal agencies to comply with stringent protocols.
While Veritone’s scalable approach works for the largest federal law enforcement agencies, it’s also proven to be an essential tool for local law enforcement as they meet the challenges of digital evidence management. AFOSI’s adoption of Veritone’s technology is a strong validation of a software-first approach to managing digital evidence on a national security level and signals a sector-wide pivot to enhancing operational effectiveness through advanced intelligent technology.
1https://www.axios.com/2023/02/27/philadelphia-police-body-camera-footage-not-reviewed
