The Importance of Evidence Management

Evidence Management - January 06, 2023
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Rimage’s solutions that support law enforcement agencies

Law enforcement agencies must use immutable Write Once, Read Many (WORM) technology to ensure sensitive evidence is not altered or tampered with during any part of an investigation or legal proceeding. That was the main theme of an article in the print and digital magazine Gov CIO Outlook featuring Rimage’s state-of-the-art evidence management solutions. For more than four decades, Rimage has been supporting law enforcement agencies from national three-letter organizations down to local police departments. And the critical requirement has always been, how to protect important evidence as it’s collected, accessed, moved, used in legal proceedings, and eventually destroyed?

“Not only does this technology protect individuals such as victims of crime, but it also protects a judicial system that relies on accurate evidence and information to enforce laws,” says Chris Rence, CEO of Rimage. “As technology has moved at the speed of light, from paper to videotape to body cam footage, law enforcement agencies must be able to walk into a courtroom with accurate data.”

Different law enforcement agencies are at different stages in their technology evolution. That’s why it’s important for them to have an evidence management solution that has the APIs needed to ingest data from multiple sources, anything from the cloud to optical disc to USB, and even some floppy discs or reel-to-reel tapes. With Rimage’s technology, agencies are able to view the data’s entire lifecycle. They know where it came from, what it is, how it was tagged, what its chain-of-custody was and how it was destroyed. And critically, they know it hasn’t been altered or tampered with.

“We’re able to validate this immutable data so that when they go to court, they’re able to look at the evidence and say, ‘Yes, all of this evidence is valid,’” says Rence. “It doesn’t matter what format it was in when it was ingested, they know that nothing could be modified after that.”

For more on how Rimage’s solutions help law enforcement agencies, check out the GOV-CIO article.