How to Manage Body-Worn Camera Recordings

November 2024

3 min read

How to Manage Body-Worn Camera Recordings

Body-worn cameras can be a great tool for criminal justice, promising transparency and greater police accountability. But there’s a problem, and a big one: they generate hundreds of hours of recordings.

In this article, I'll show you how public defenders are using Reduct.Video to:

Transcribe and manage hundreds of hours of body-worn camera recordings received during discovery
Review, search, and analyze the recordings to narrow down to the important moments
Analyze evidence from multiple body-worn cameras recordings the same event
Translate body-worn camera recordings from one language to another
Create video exhibits to bring body-worn camera evidence to life in court

Transcribe and manage hours of body-worn camera recordings received during discovery

With Reduct.Video, you can bulk import all your discovery from wherever it is stored: your hard-drive, pendrive, Google Drive or Dropbox.

We support all the major formats that you'll receive from major body-worn camera hardware manufacturers like Axon and there's no limits on filesize or video length, so you can ingest all your recordings in one go without worrying about anything getting stuck.

As soon as you upload your content, our AI transcription engine will transcribe all the recording and add speaker labels. Silences in the recording are denoted by gray boxes in the transcript.

This would have been expensive to do with court transcribers in the past, but due to availability of various platforms like Reduct.Video, the costs are now affordable enough to transcribe all your body-worn camera discovery at once.

If you want, you can have our expert human transcribers review the AI-generated transcript to enhance its accuracy with a single click of a button; it will cost you a little extra, but you'll start your review with a much cleaner transcript.

You can also export the transcript to print with or without the timestamps.

Review, search, and analyze the recording to narrow down the important incidents

Reduct's AI transcripts are interactive, which means that each word in the transcript is automatically synced with the video recording.

You can skim through the conversations happening between the different stakeholders in the case and click on any word to start playing the video recording from that exact moment.

While searching for a word, our advanced search looks for that specific word within the recording: for example the mention of the word "drug" across all the recordings in the case, brings out "drug." But if you click on our fuzzy search, it can search for the general idea of the word.

For instance, a fuzzy search for the word drug will also show you mentions of methadone, substance and prescription.

You can also ask Reduct.Video to summarize the recording for you.

We understand that AI summaries might not capture all the facts of the case, that’s why we link each part of the summary to its corresponding timestamp.

This allows you to use the summary as a guide to navigate to the relevant sections of the recording—like a table of contents for the key events in the case.

Simply click on the linked timestamp of the one-liner summary and jump directly to that incident within the recording.

Analyze evidence from multiple body-worn cameras recording the same incident

One of the biggest challenges while reviewing body-worn camera recording is piecing together the fragmented timeline captured by multiple officers' cameras, each arriving at the scene at different times.

This lack of synchronization makes it harder to understand the clear sequence of events and fully piece together the same incident captured from multiple angles.

Additionally, body-worn cameras are often turned on and off at various moments, resulting in gaps in recording missing critical incidents.

Keeping this in mind, we built a new multicam sync feature where you can view multiple body-worn cameras on a single view and with a multi angle display.

This creates both a timeline view, as well as a multi-camera view for different cams recorded at the same time.

The overlapping recording in a single view also displays transcript side-by-side making your review process more quicker.

Translate body-worn camera recordings from one language to another

Many PDs have to defend clients that don't speak English. This is where they can use Reduct's translation feature to process body-worn camera recordings that are recorded in Spanish and understand what's happening.

Reduct supports this kind of translation flow for 90+ languages, and we've heard that the translation quality is pretty good for some languages, and not the best for others.

Create video exhibits to bring body-worn camera evidence to life in court

Once you've identified the key piece of evidence you want to present in court, Reduct makes it super easy to clip out captioned video exhibits; just select the part of the transcript that you want and turn that highlighted portion into a reel.

You can combine multiple such clips into a single reel and with the click of a button download a captioned video exhibit that you can store in a pendrive to take to the court.

You can also add title slides to your video exhibits to present a more powerful and impactful presentation to the court.

Multiple workload studies and our own experience working with public defenders has made it clear that public defense is underwater.

We have 100s of hours of body-worn camera recordings. And then, to make it worse, we have situations where police officers turn off body-worn cameras at critical moments.

And on the other hand, we have ancient tooling. Feels like we’re working with typewriters in a dingy basement.

It's time for the public defense system to invest in better tools.