Not just a camera

As I mentioned in the comments thread that took off after Christmas, we're in the process of making the conversion from film to digital photography. We have been creeping that way for several years, but 2009 should close the door on Polaroid and 35 mm film. This week, we'll begin issuing a large shipment of Canon digital cameras, so that each officer will have a decent point-and-shoot to supplement the more capable digital SLRs issued to each patrol team and to the criminal investigations team.

Moving to digital, though, is not just a matter of buying a pallet load of cameras. The more significant issue is dealing with the resulting files as digital evidence--which is exactly what those images are. Part of the conversion is building the capacity to handle digital evidence. This will require software, hardware, procedures, and training. It's a piece of cake to use a digital point-and-shoot, but what about after the shot? The present method of burning digital images to CD and tagging those discs into our Property & Evidence Unit is hardly an improvement.

We need to have a process for intake that loads those images onto a secure server and tags them with database fields for future retrieval and connection to our other records pertaining to the case. There must be a process for maintaining the chain-of-custody and security of those files--including backup and archival storage. It's important to create a secure log file that tracks the who, when, where, and what associated with the creation, input, viewing, printing, or manipulation of digital evidence; and of course the original digital file must be maintained intact and unaltered. Finally, we want to serve digital evidence--so that it can be viewed via our intranet, and so that workflow processes can be created that allow technicians to work with this evidence when needed without sneaker-netting CDs around the department.

Some officers will recall the days before digital mug shots, when getting a photo meant a trip to the Records Unit, searching through file draws, manually creating photo spreads for lineups, and so forth. With digital mug shots (especially the 2005 update to the software), the availability and access was dramatically improved to great benefit. It's pretty much the same thing with digital cameras: the type of camera is meaningless unless you are leveraging the digital evidence in a way that improves on the workflow and helps get the job done more efficiently and effectively.

Digital evidence is not just photographic images, either. A byte's a byte, and digital evidence files might be documents, audio files, video files, and so forth. This is going to be one of the more significant changes of the year, so standby for not just a new camera, but for changes in training, procedures, and a new way of thinking about electronic evidence as the year unfolds.