NICE announced that police forces across England and Wales have used NICE Investigate to manage more than 4 million investigations involving millions of digital evidence items. Powered by NICE’s cloud-based Evidencentral platform, NICE Investigate helps police forces digitally transform how digital evidence and investigations are managed.
Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE, commented, “Crime-solving is about finding the truth, and that hinges on digital evidence. But with digital evidence residing in so many different systems and places, investigators waste enormous amounts of time searching for, collecting, copying and analysing it, and shuttling it from place to place. NICE Investigate eliminates these manual processes that slow investigators down so they can put their time to better use doing the work they signed up to do – solving cases.”
End-to-end criminal justice process
NICE Investigate is developed to assist police forces by achieving cost-savings and efficiency gains through digital transformation of the end-to-end criminal justice process. Digital evidence management enables investigators to collect evidence through a single login. NICE Investigate automatically pulls digital evidence from integrated systems into electronic case folders to jump-start case building. Investigators can also share digital case files with the Crown Prosecution Service and other justice partners electronically as well.
Police forces report efficiency gains through automated case building, and the ability to automatically pull digital evidence into digital case folders. NICE Investigate also eliminates a myriad of other manual tasks involved in managing digital evidence (such as copying evidence onto CDs, DVDs and USB drives). This leads to time savings from reductions in trips to collect evidence (one police force eliminated 4,500 weekly trips). Evidence can be collected in a fraction of the time, and without tying up officers in travel.
Digital evidence
Digital evidence can also be shared faster with the Crown Prosecution Service through fully digital means. One police force reported that the time it takes to share evidence has been reduced from 3-5 days to hours. Reduced risk to victims due to earlier charging decisions and higher remand rates, resulting from the ability to obtain, review and share digital evidence quickly and effectively.
Better community engagement in crime-fighting by digitally transforming how citizens and businesses share digital evidence. Over 5,500 UK businesses have registered their CCTV cameras with NICE Investigate, with 9,000 more invited and pending registration.