How To Review Bodycam Footage More Efficiently

The public defense system in the United States is under heavy strain. Many offices are handling more cases than they can reasonably manage, and each case now comes with a growing volume of digital evidence.

Body-worn camera footage is a major part of that shift. A single case comes with hours of video, from multiple police officers, with no easy way to go through it.

This creates a practical problem. Attorneys are expected to thoroughly get through all the bodycam footage. However, watching it all is simply not efficient.

More often than not, we see defenders outsourcing this to interns. And while hiring more attorneys helps, the workload simply spreads across more people.

To make a real difference, the way evidence is reviewed has to change.

The core issue

The underlying problem is that video is a difficult medium for legal work.

You can Ctrl+F to search through a deposition. You can highlight a brief. You can share a doc with co-counsel and they can find what you flagged. With body cam recordings, none of that works. The file is too big to email. There's no way to search inside it. The only way to know what's on minute 38 is to watch minute 38. And if you find something useful, your only way to share it is "go watch the file AXON132601123212 from 38:14 to 39:02."

So defenders push through and compromise personal time or sleep to get through it all. They watch on 1.5x. They take timestamp notes in a Word doc. They forward 4GB files over Dropbox links that expire.

And this process doesn't scale with the increasing volume of bodycam videos.

Here’s a better workflow with Reduct

An efficient workflow makes footage easier to navigate and work with, while making sure you can still thoroughly get through hours and hours of footage. And most importantly, it's easy to scale.

And we have designed Reduct thoughtfully for the defense side.

1. Upload to a centralized, secure cloud solution

Sharing large files between team members and the constant back-and-forth slows down work quite a lot. This can be solved by having a cloud storage solution that lets you play the video directly from the cloud.

2. Transcribe all your bodycam footage

Reading text is easier to consume than video. When footage is transcribed, you can read what was said, scan for relevant sections, quickly identify silences, and move faster without missing anything important. This removes the need to rely on memory or guess where something might be.

3. Search instead of scrub

Instead of scrubbing through a timeline, you search for specific words, names, or phrases. And now that the video is converted to text, you can get to a specific moment in the footage.

4. Highlight and organize key moments

When you find the important 1 minute in an hour-long video, you should be able to highlight that part, add comments, and invite your team members to take a look at it. Labeling them clearly and grouping them by issue or theme will help you organize evidence better.

5. Preparing footage for use in court

Review is only useful if you can present the evidence clearly. This includes making sure the right clip is being used. Being able to clip down the most important 1 minute can save so much time on back-and-forth with the video editing team.

Our commitment to the defense side

At Reduct, we believe the best use of technology is to take away the "non-lawyering" tasks—the cumbersome, administrative friction that keeps you away from your practice. We also believe the same tool cannot serve both sides. We are here for the defense and don't serve prosecution at all.

And with the big push towards 'everything AI,' we've been intentional about where and how to adopt AI. If you want to understand how Reduct fits into a larger shift in legal technology, and how we are thinking about this change, please read:

• Why the legal AI revolution is looking in the wrong direction
• Why public defense needs a digital revolution, not just more lawyers

Apply to our pro bono program

At Reduct, we believe that the quality of a criminal defense should never be limited by technical barriers. Every person is entitled to a vigorous defense, but in an era of "discovery by a thousand gigabytes," technology can often become a hurdle rather than a tool.

CLIP is a partnership where Reduct embeds our engineering team into criminal defense cases to ensure that your ability to represent your client is never sidelined by voluminous data or technical limitations.