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Damovo ‘CODES’ to replace outdated police interview tapes
Damovo UK, the enterprise ICT solutions and service provider, today launched its Complete Online Digital Evidence System (CODES) which provides secure interview and evidential recording for the police, law enforcement and security services.
CODES is a flexible package of technologies, designed to facilitate the investigative interviewing of suspects, victims and witnesses. This includes: voice and/or video recording equipment (including microphones and cameras), an interview management console with either a touch screen or keyboard, software and server-based data storage for quick and easy retrieval.
CODES aims to replace outdated analogue tape recordings and meet the National Policing Improvement Agency’s (NPIA) recommendations for ICT best practice. As analogue systems reach “end of life”, digital, server-based solutions are widely accepted as the way forward. CODES also ensures compliance with current and future Management of Police Information (MoPI) directives, along with the two new Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) Codes of Practice, E and F.
“Cassettes are becoming obsolete due to the obvious limitations of their analogue format. For instance, with traditional interview tapes their recording capacity enforces a break in the interview process every 45 minutes to change the cassette, rather than the PACE requirement of every 2 hours, resulting in disruption and police downtime. Tapes also take up a lot of space – some police forces are holding up to half a million tapes – and the storage requirement for voice evidence recorded in custody is seven years. However, despite this the criminal justice system is still relying on this decades-old technology to capture crucial evidence from suspects and witnesses,” commented Graham Dickinson, Business Development Manager at Damovo.
CODES offers an efficient, secure platform for storage and delivery, together with an intuitive workflow that reduces the number of processes required to conduct interviews and ensures complete integrity of the entire process. Damovo CODES benefits includes cost savings through simplified workflows, lower storage overheads, police and administrative time savings and minimised disruption during the interview process. In addition, it allows better judicial efficiency as recordings are available within minutes and generates more reliable evidence that doesn’t degrade over time.
Furthermore, using CODES all case-related digital information, including interview recordings, transcripts, photographs and other evidence can be easily integrated into an electronic case file. All metadata and the content of every transcript is indexed, enabling all data to be searched rapidly by keywords or phrases by police teams across the Service. Added mobility and flexibility is also offered as mobile teams can obtain statements and conduct interviews in the field with voice and video recordings being automatically uploaded to the server.
As there is no need to change tapes every 45 minutes, interviews suffer fewer disruptions, restoring control of the process to the interviewing officer. Any location can be electronically connected to the interview room, giving teams in different locations access to live video and audio streaming.
The Damovo CODES platform has been designed to be open-ended in supporting future technologies and capabilities, such as body-worn video, head cams and CCTV. It is anticipated that police forces will increasingly look to adopt video capability in future as part of their efforts to support Achieving Best Evidence (ABE) in criminal proceedings. Damovo CODES offers video capture in addition to audio recordings, enabling police forces to use voice-only for routine elements of the investigative process with video used on a discretionary basis, such as serious offences and for vulnerable witness or child interviews.
