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Hitachi Vantara delivers digital evidence management solution for law enforcement

24 Sep 2018

Hitachi Vantara has announced the availability of an integrated solution to address the challenges of digital evidence management in modern policing, Hitachi Digital Evidence Management (HDEM). The exponential increase of digital evidence from an increasing number of sources has challenged law enforcement with the complex and time-consuming task of identifying and organising digital evidence needed for investigation and prosecution. Law enforcement officials are challenged by compliance policies and procedures such as evidence disclosure rules. They are also hampered by antiquated manual processes that can introduce delays and mistakes from the initial collection of evidence within existing pools of information to its ongoing management throughout an investigation. These growing challenges can limit the ability of law enforcement to manage the collected evidence efficiently and ensure that it is available when required. The HDEM solution provides an opportunity for law enforcement to meet these challenges and set new standards for using evidence in today's digital world. Hitachi Digital Evidence Management is scalable, permitting the collection of data from any digital source so it can be placed in context for an investigation or prosecution. This includes body-worn and car video cameras, mobile phones, documents, closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other digital information sources. Using HDEM, law enforcement can identify and associate evidence with a particular case, and secure, analyse, clip, redact and handle it according to the guidelines of police information management in the local jurisdiction. Measures to enable GDPR compliance are built into the application together with security and user provisioning to assist law enforcement in building criminal cases and gaining further intelligence from the collected digital evidence. By automating the discovery, processing, analysis, organisation, storage and sharing of information that is retrieved from multiple evidential sources, HDEM is data-agnostic, meaning that it even works with dissimilar data formats from multiple sources. This capability allows law enforcement to paint a comprehensive and integrated evidential picture and supports prosecution efforts, helping law enforcement lead criminal cases to more efficient and effective closure. HDEM also manages evidential continuity and integrity issues to prevent challenges to its validity. The solution allows seamless delivery of evidence packages to the prosecuting authorities for both pre-charging decisions and case progression.

Lincolnshire Police assistant chief constable Andrew White says, "It can be challenging and time-consuming to collect and manage all of the diverse types of digital evidence we require for effective policing." "Hitachi Digital Evidence Management are working with Lincolnshire Police to prove there is a solution to manage, secure, share and analyse all the digital evidence we acquire helping us to ensure that investigations are conducted efficiently, and evidence is disclosed in the right manner at the appropriate time. “In turn, this will help us to provide effective policing by being able to focus our resources on solving crimes and have a positive impact on our communities." The core HDEM platform ingests data from the repositories of existing endpoint devices such as body-worn video and has web portals available for the public and partners to upload possible evidence directly into the solution. Additional modules are available, including live facial matching for greater insight from the collected digital evidence. Hitachi Digital Evidence Management is available initially for police and law enforcement agencies within Abu Dhabi, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Dubai, India, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom. HDEM will be expanded into other countries and localised for additional use cases in the future. HDEM is available on a price-per-officer subscription basis.