NICE today announced that the Pinal County (Arizona) Attorney’s Office will be deploying NICE Justice digital evidence management, one of the AI-powered solutions in NICE’s Evidencentral platform, to streamline justice and provide better service to the community. Pinal County is home to half a million residents, making it the third-most populous county in Arizona.
The cloud-based NICE Justice solution digitally transforms how district attorneys and office staff receive, interact with, manage, and share digital evidence. Freed from dealing with discs, drives, emails, and logging into multiple systems to manage and prepare evidence, attorneys and staff can focus on building and presenting compelling cases. NICE Justice also features built-in AI and automation capabilities for object detection, automated case building, video and audio transcription and translation, optical character recognition (OCR), analytics, and finding evidence connections.
Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer said, “Our office is dedicated to ensuring fair and impartial justice and providing personalized attention to each case. We also have a fiscal responsibility to our taxpayers. NICE Justice will assist attorneys and staff members in performing their duties more efficiently and effectively by digitally transforming how we manage digital evidence. This will enable us to deliver the highest levels of service to our community.”
Chris Wooten, Executive Vice President, NICE, said, “Criminal justice agencies worldwide are adopting our Evidencentral platform to alleviate the manual tasks involved in managing growing digital evidence. This allows them to instead concentrate on the crucial work of investigating and prosecuting cases. The Pinal County Attorney’s Office is the most recent progressive agency to follow suit.”
The Pinal County Attorney’s Office is staffed by 150 professionals who provide legal representation and innovative crime prevention programs with an eye toward ensuring safe, stable, and prosperous communities. As the chief prosecuting agency for Pinal County, the Office litigates over 2,500 felony and 1,000 misdemeanor cases annually.
Like many prosecuting agencies, the Pinal County Attorney’s Office is being inundated with digital evidence, from cell phones, body-worn cameras, and other sources. The Office collaborates with a dozen-plus law enforcement agencies on cases and receives evidence on USBs and thumb drives, which requires manual downloading and re-uploading to other systems.
NICE Justice simplifies this eDiscovery process by providing a single portal for law enforcement agencies to upload digital evidence. Evidence is automatically matched to the correct digital case folders and immediately accessible to attorneys upon login.
Discovery with defense is also streamlined through a fully digital, trackable process. Instead of manually copying digital evidence onto CDs, staff can email secure links to digital case files. NICE Justice’s audit trail automatically tracks when evidence is received and opened. Additionally, NICE Justice features built-in tools to boost prosecutor productivity, including the ability to transcode video, create clips, redact evidence, transcribe and translate audio, and assemble evidence on timelines or maps.
