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Axon Justice’s newest feature, Trusted Upload, makes the process of requesting and receiving digital evidence easier than ever.
The criminal justice ecosystem is large and complex, especially when it comes to digital evidence. Requesting and receiving digital evidence for a single case can generate multiple hard drives’ worth of data, which must be shared between partnering organizations and attorney’s offices, all of which may use incompatible storage systems.
This is one of the reasons why Axon created Trusted Upload, a feature within Axon Justice that allows Justice customers to easily request and receive digital evidence from organizations outside of the Axon ecosystem.
Partners can range from Law Enforcement agencies that don’t currently utilize Axon solutions, to enterprise businesses with relevant information pertinent to pretrial preparation. With a simple request, trusted agencies can directly upload evidence from anywhere to the cloud, streamlining the collection of digital evidence.
Collecting digital evidence: then and now
Digital evidence has experienced exponential growth over the past few years. While this evidence can help close more cases, it can also create some serious headaches.
In addition to police reports and crime scene photos that used to make up the majority of the discovery process, today's discovery includes a plethora of additional evidence. These sources include items such as digital photos, body worn camera footage, CCTV footage, cell phone data, interview recordings, drone footage, in-car fleet videos, and more.
In 2023 Axon conducted a Key Trends in Digital Evidence Report for Prosecutors, Public Defenders, and other attorneys to better understand how often prosecutors encounter different sources of digital evidence. The study revealed that:
92% of attorneys frequently or very frequently encounter video evidence.
86% of attorneys frequently or very frequently encounter still images.
77% encounter audio recordings frequently or very frequently
52% encounter cell phone extractions frequently or very frequently.
Such statistics highlight that those in the legal profession are facing more digital evidence of various types than ever before, which complicates and hinders this one simple process of sharing evidence.
Once Prosecutors receive all of the digital evidence from Law Enforcement Agencies, the public, relevant businesses, etc, they have to organize and store it. Based on responses from Axon’s Key Trends in Digital Evidence Report, Prosecutors, Public Defenders, and other attorneys use three methods on average to store digital evidence (including video evidence, cellphone extractions, electronic documents, etc.):
62% of organizations store their data by burning it onto CD/DVDs.
56% of organizations use USB sticks to save their data.
53% of organizations upload their data to a cloud or on-prem digital evidence solution.
With such a variety of storage methods, prosecutors must often comb through evidence from different sources and formats, and the majority of that material may have no bearing on the case. Then, they must share all of this evidence with defense lawyers and hope incompatible systems don’t create additional work.
The unfortunate reality is that disparate systems are pervasive and do require more effort to share digital evidence. Transferring significant amounts of information across such incompatible systems is challenging, and requires agencies to perform menial tasks, which creates inefficiencies.
This is why Axon built Trusted Upload for Justice customers. With less obstacles and friction, Justice users can leverage Trusted Upload to easily request and receive digital evidence from relevant stakeholders who aren’t in the Axon ecosystem, all from one central location.
How Trusted Upload works
Axon’s newest evidence sharing method allows Justice customers to concentrate on building their cases rather than being burdened by how they’ll collect all the necessary digital evidence. With Trusted Upload, Justice users have another tool to help them bridge the gap.
Here’s how it works: Using Axon Justice, a prosecutor’s office can identify someone as a trusted user which could include local law enforcement, other attorneys, private security agencies, enterprise businesses and anyone else who is not part of the Axon ecosystem but has evidence to share.
The trusted users will then receive a link and identify what is needed based on associated police reports or other relevant information. They can then upload all of their digital evidence directly into Axon Justice right from the web to the cloud (which means no more burning DVDs and driving across town for them, and no more sifting through countless storage devices for attorneys). And once the evidence is uploaded, Justice users will be able to view the evidence right from their Axon Justice case.
As a web-based application, there’s no need for the trusted user to install software; they simply drag and drop the evidence in the browser and send it to the Justice user. Additionally, Trusted Upload doesn’t require any pre registration or onboarding, further simplifying this partner share method to make it easily accessible.
While Trusted Upload is similar to another Axon tool called Community Request, it has a couple of integral differences. First, Community Request is primarily meant for the public to use to upload digital evidence, whereas Trusted Upload is intended for larger scale partner agencies or enterprise businesses that don’t currently leverage Axon products. Moreover, with Trusted Upload the trusted user’s digital evidence goes directly into the relevant case, which does not happen with Community Request portal. This key distinction prevents the need for any kind of triage process since the evidence automatically goes into the correct case with all the relevant metadata included.
After the Justice user and trusted user complete the evidence share, an activity log and audit report are created for both sides to maintain transparency in the Justice workflow. Axon included such features in Trusted Upload to build a platform for long-term partnerships, as these won’t be one-off digital evidence shares, but rather continued cooperation across cases for years to come.
In addition to Justice users leveraging Trusted Upload to receive digital evidence from relevant partners not in the Axon ecosystem, they can also use Trusted Upload to request specific information. Oftentimes when reviewing a case, prosecutors will be looking for a particular piece of digital evidence, and when that happens, they can use Trusted Upload to request the specific information from a trusted user who then sends it directly to the case within Axon Justice.
The impact
Trusted Upload allows organizations within the Axon ecosystem to receive materials from organizations outside of the Axon ecosystem. By doing so without the additional overhead of setting up ingestion portals (another method of collecting evidence), Prosecutors are able to maintain their Justice workflows from the same platform to more efficiently manage the discovery process. Trusted upload helps Prosecutors’ agencies share evidence more effectively by:
Allowing the trusted user to upload large amount of data from the web
Allowing the Justice user to collect everything from the same destination
Creating an audit trail for both the evidence sender and receiver
Trusted Upload also has a significant use case for rural and less populous areas. Due to fewer crimes being committed in such areas, Law Enforcement and Prosecutors interact less and therefore don’t often have means to easily share digital evidence. When a crime then does occur, they must resort to antiquated sharing methods such as burning discs and driving them across town. Instead with Trusted Upload, a prosecutor’s agency can simply assign a trusted user at the local police station, who then uploads their data directly to the prosecutor’s case in Axon Justice.
Axon Justice’s capabilities with Trusted Upload help streamline and simplify the discovery process. Prosecutor’s agencies within the Axon Justice platform can easily collect evidence for their cases by assigning trusted users who can then share critical information, as well as request specific data that could be crucial for their case.
Leveraging a tool like Trusted Upload inside of Axon Justice is a win-win for both prosecutors and partner agencies and enterprise businesses. Not only does it make it easier to request and send evidence between agencies, but more importantly, it helps preserve truth by preserving digital evidence in a more modernized and efficient manner.
Interested in seeing Trusted Upload in action? Contact us today for a demo and to learn more about Axon Justice.