When most people think about Law Enforcement, they probably imagine a bunch of police officers running down the street, chasing the bad guys. Bringing law to practice. But police work involves digging for clues from surveillance cameras, interviews, court videos etc. And paperwork. Lots of it.

In a National Survey submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice, officers in the U.S. spend an average 45% of their time on administrative duties.

I’m not implying that administrative work isn’t important. But it’s kind of funny to bring administration almost to the same level of importance as practice.

To grasp the importance administration has in each case, let’s take a closer look at this less action-filled face of Law Enforcement. After that, we’ll touch on how Artificial Intelligence systems help with video transcription and in-video search.

Reducing Paperwork Efforts With Workflows and Automation

Thanks to Open-Source software like ArkCase, Alfresco, Ephesoft, and thanks to the easy accessibility of the Amazon Web Services, law enforcement agencies can now get a cost-effective legal case management solution and reclaim those 45% time spent on paperwork.

Over the years, our team at Armedia has handled large data migration projects for government agencies. We’ve learned how things work from a workflow perspective, and from a technology perspective.

This experience helped us put together an add-on module for Legal Case Management. Our base is ArkCase, an open-source case management solution that neatly uses:

• AWS, for practically infinite scalability and ease of access
• Ephesoft, for quick and easy document digitalization
• Alfresco, for DoD 5015 compliant data storage

Because ArkCase is open-source, it’s the perfect platform for building a cost-effective legal case management solution.

Most paperwork in legal cases is repetitive work. Because of that, we’ve built-in the workflow with all needed forms and dependencies between forms. Law enforcement agencies will need little to no work to get the system tweaked according to their needs.

So when one officer opens a case for any infraction, depending on the type of case, all the forms come up and the officer basically just needs to follow the workflow. The system is guiding the officer and ensures there is no room for human error in the case-building work.

Improving Efficiency with AI-Powered Video Transcription

Screenshot of AWS Transcribe, integrated in ArkCase

Other than setting up the paperwork for the case, officers are hard-pressed to be detailed in building the case using evidence.

Most of the times recorded interviews, court recordings of witness statements are key evidence in closing a case.

In complex cases, it’s hard to keep in mind all of the interviews, all of the nuances, all of the mentions of key words and phrases. This is why video transcriptions are so crucial for legal workers.

Thanks to strong progress in Artificial Intelligence systems like AWS, accurate video transcription services is no longer a tall order.

The screenshot above is a preview of the ArkCase interface for video transcription. A law enforcement officer needs to upload the video file, and AWS takes over. Thanks to massive hardware infrastructure, processing each video and extracting the speech into text happens very quickly. Within minutes, entire videos can be transcribed, with timestamps and an easy-to-use interface for fixing the text to get 100% accuracy.

Once the transcribed video is checked for transcription accuracy, the entire text is stored as part of the case. This text is indexed and searchable.

Law enforcement officers can search entire batches of videos on a given keyword. The system returns the list of mentions of that keyphrase, with a timestamp, so people can just click the link and see the video at the exact time when the searched phrase is mentioned in the video.

This simple, yet extremely helpful AI integration makes legal case management a lot easier, and a lot more effective.

It would be interesting to see how much time gets saved on paperwork if only all of the law enforcement agencies switch to such a modern legal case management platform.

To Conclude

Law Enforcement is not just about chasing criminals on the streets. An evidence can be captured in a single word in a court hearing or in an interview. To get to that word when solving a case, your employees must have a helping hand.

Built from the ground up as a Case Management System, Armedia Legal Case Management Module for ArkCase includes configurable workflows, forms, rules, and access-level management.
Our legal platform is all about managing a case from start to finish. And since Law Enforcement processes are never rigidly structured, our workflows are configured as dynamic and collaborative. Designed to handle complex, non-linear processes and track enormous amounts of data, whether it is scanned documents or multimedia material like court recordings.

This solution will help any Law Enforcement organization to save time, effort, and resources while increasing the security, quality, and value of all case records.

If you have any questions or comments related to our Legal Module, feel free to contact us.

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