It is important to examine and investigate digital evidence, just as it is with physical evidence. When investigating evidence and building a narrative based on what happened, countless factors must be taken into accounts, such as the quality of an image, the frame rate of a video, and the camera's perspective.
Fremont, CA: The use of digital evidence is becoming increasingly important in investigations. Digital evidence has changed the way investigators uncover the truth through videos, still images, audio recordings, digital tags attached to physical evidence, social media content, and PDF documents.
The purpose of this guide is to help you streamline workflows for collecting, storing, managing, investigating, and sharing digital evidence.
Digital evidence capture
The first step in an efficient digital evidence workflow is effectively recording and logging digital evidence. To improve the quality of digital evidence, law enforcement officers can utilize several tools and processes. Despite this, law enforcement officers are not the only ones who capture digital evidence.
Evidence from third parties: what you need to know
The lack of control over the recording device and settings can be frustrating when it comes to third-party digital evidence. It is possible for third-party evidence to be crisp and clear, with excellent audio quality and high resolution. Third-party evidence is usually filmed with a low-cost CCTV camera with a lower resolution.
First-party evidence: What you need to know
Body-worn cameras (BWCs), dashboard cameras, smartphones, and even TASER energy weapons can be used by law enforcement to capture digital evidence.
The storage of digital evidence
The process of gathering evidence does not end with the capture of evidence. What do you do with the evidence once you have it?
Digital evidence storage
What is the best place to store all the digital evidence that you capture and retrieve? Agency approaches have historically been fragmented. Records from the BWC are stored in the cloud, images from crime scenes are stored on computers, shared evidence from neighboring agencies is stored on Dropbox, and CCTV footage from five cameras is stored on external hard drives.
Evidence management in the digital age
In an electronic forensics lab, the benefits of centralizing and securing large amounts of evidence are many, but what happens when you have to find and manage individual pieces of evidence? Organizing your DEMS solution will make it easy for you to locate the digital evidence you need.
When you organize your data and provide tags and other important metadata, you will save time later on in the investigation.
Using digital evidence to investigate crimes
It is important to examine and investigate digital evidence, just as it is with physical evidence. When investigating evidence and building a narrative based on what happened, countless factors must be taken into accounts, such as the quality of an image, the frame rate of a video, and the camera's perspective.
The sharing of digital evidence
Officers may need to share digital evidence for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they are working with another agency and need to share their knowledge. An incident may be captured on a body camera, and the media requests access to the recording. Evidence will often need to be shared with lawyers involved in the case.
