The availability of digital assets in UK policing is on an exponential rise. Members of the public expect to see digital solutions in place by their local police force for supporting crime prevention and community engagement. With the common use of smartphones, body-worn video and CCTV, the physical drain on the police service to gather, manage and disclose digital assets has never been higher.

When a digital asset has been created and identified as a potential piece of evidence to be included in an investigation, that asset along with its original meta-data is now part of an important story. The asset will travel through a sequence of important events; a police investigation, become referenced and linked to a case file and eventually be disclosed as evidence in a criminal trial. 

Today, we have the ability to technically support every step of that journey by streamlining workflows between platforms based on business rules, provide a secure audited chain of custody, and enable the public, police forces and judicial partners to work seamlessly to gain successful outcomes and prosecutions. 

Streamlining workflows within digital evidence and asset management solutions needs to carry four immediate business benefits for the police in the UK today: 

1. Give the general public access to a secure and controlled portal with the ability to submit an asset which is auto-tagged to an incident.
2. Automate the ingest of multiple sources of digital assets with auto-tagging such as body-worn video
3. Provide secure storage of the asset alongside a data pool of other potentially related assets, where investigation tools can be used to open new lines of enquiry
4. Provide either a self serve access for Judicial partners or a fully integrated sharing platform (as in the case of the Scottish Government) to allow original evidence to be presented in court along with case file and audit report to validate the integrity of the evidence. 

In December 2018, the UK Crown Prosecution Service updated several official guidelines due to a significant number of criminal trials collapsing due to the lack of disclosure of digital evidence. Evidence integrity was key to this, with a call to support search strategies, analytics and the ability to isolate certain elements of key evidence that may have specific privileges but still be disclosed as used or unused evidence material. 

CommandCentral has been designed to support the Policing Vision 2025 in England and Wales and the Digital Strategy for Justice in Scotland along with national standards due to be published by the Digital Policing Portfolio (DPP) including the following national programmes: Digital Intelligence and Investigation (DII, Digital First (DF) and Single Online Home (SOLH). CommandCentral has also been designed to specifically meet the secure authenticated access and sharing requirements of the CPS, particularly defence practitioners and legal barristers. 

Kelly Harrison. 

Solution Manager, CommandCentral Suite 

Kelly is presently responsible for managing the end to end portfolio of CommandCentral Suite at Motorola Solutions. An innovative software specialist with 10 years experience in Public Safety solutions including Command and Control, Communications, Mobility, Evidence and Records Management Solutions. Kelly prides herself on driving operational outcomes, in particular in overcoming complex requirements for customers with multiple ICT challenges.

Kelly is on LinkedIn