File Photo – McHenry County Courthouse | Photo: Google Street View

The McHenry County State’s Attorney’s Office said they are rolling out new software to use in the office that will help centralize records and feature artificial intelligence to help with case building.

The McHenry County State’s Attorney’s Office announced it will be using the cloud-based software NICE Justice to receive, interact, manage and share digital evidence.

Attorneys and staff will no longer have to deal with discs, drives, emails and logging into multiple systems to manage and prepare evidence.

The software also features built-in artificial intelligence and automation capabilities for face detection, automated case building, video and audio transcription, optical character recognition, finding evidence connections and analytics.

“Our goal is the ethical pursuit of justice. We have a duty to seek the truth above all else, and that truth is often revealed through digital evidence. However, as our law enforcement partners adopt more digital systems, digital evidence is becoming increasingly difficult to collect, analyze, understand and share through conventional means,” McHenry County State’s Attorney Randi Freese said.

[Suggested Article]  6 masked gunmen commit home invasion after resident orders pizza delivery in North Chicago

“NICE Justice is going to help us find the truth in digital evidence faster and work more efficiently with our law enforcement partners as we pursue justice for victims,” Freese said.

Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President of NICE, said the rapid growth of digital evidence has outpaced many criminal justice agencies’ ability to manage and understand it.

“Attorneys waste countless hours collecting it, uploading it, trying to make sense of it, and replicating it for discovery – time that could be better spent investigating and prosecuting cases,” Wooten said.

The state’s attorney’s office oversees approximately 3,000 criminal cases annually, working with the Illinois State Police and 36 other law enforcement partners.

Digital evidence, including video from CCTV, body-worn cameras and in-car cameras, and data from phone dumps and social media posts, is playing a growing role in prosecutions. Most of the evidence is received on discs and thumb drives.

[Suggested Article]  Firefighters rescue pet, extinguish fire that broke out on Great Lakes Naval Base in Lake County

Jorge Enciso, Legal Technology Division Supervisor at the McHenry County State’s Attorney’s Office said the influx of digital evidence has been “astronomical.”

“But beyond the quantity, the size of the files is also challenging. It’s not uncommon for a case to involve twenty video files, many with high-quality 4K resolution. These video files usually have to be transcoded and manually uploaded,” Enciso said.

“NICE Justice will result in a major quality-of-life improvement for our attorneys and staff because it will automatically do the transcoding for us and eliminate the need to manually upload digital evidence,” Enciso said.

Police department investigators will be able to use NICE Justice’s secure portal to upload evidence to the cloud where it will be automatically placed into digital case folders and become immediately accessible to assigned attorneys.

[Suggested Article]  Firefighters rescue cat while battling house fire in sub-zero temperatures in Johnsburg

“Our office especially appreciates the AI capabilities and investigative tools that are built into NICE Justice, such as the ability to index and transform PDF files into searchable documents, and evidence tagging, and transcription. Making these capabilities universally available to attorneys will deepen the quality of our investigations and prosecutions,” Enciso said.