Business

Veritone announced all law enforcement agencies which acquire body-worn cameras (BWCs) through the recently announced Bureau of Justice Assistance grant are eligible for six months of the company’s video redaction software at no charge.

Used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the country, Veritone Redact helps agencies significantly reduce the labor intensive task of redacting personally identifiable information (PII) within video and audio evidence. By greatly accelerating the timely release of video evidence from officer-involved incidents, agencies enhance their transparency and build trust within the communities they serve.

The BJA’s grant will fund BWCs for any law enforcement department within 50 or fewer full-time sworn personnel, rural agencies (those agencies within non-urban or non-metro counties); and federally-recognized Tribal agencies.

According to a 2017 report released by CNA, which analyzed the behavior of over 400 officers, BWC-wearing officers generated significantly fewer complaints and use of force reports relative to control officers without cameras. BWC-wearing officers also made more arrests and issued more citations than their non-BWC-wearing controls. While these findings are clearly beneficial to agencies and communities alike, this massive collection of video files has introduced unintended consequences.

Public records workflow and disclosure specialists GovQA’s Peers in Public Records report indicates since 2018, there has been a 200% upswing in public records requests for the release of video produced by body-worn cameras. Most law enforcement agencies are not adequately staffed to keep up with this demand due to the amount of time required to remove PII from this video and audio evidence prior to disclosure.

“Shortly after we introduced our BWC program, we needed to respond to a public records request for some of the footage. It took our digital evidence technician eight hours to manually redact, frame-by-frame, PII of innocent bystanders in the footage. And that was just a 10 minute video clip,” said Amanda O’Neill, Records Manager at Eureka Police Department. “As a small agency, we don’t have the resources to dedicate to this very laborious, but important work. Thankfully, we were introduced to Veritone and the amount of time we have subsequently saved by using their automated redaction software is incalculable.”

“Keeping our community safe, while earning their trust through our actions is of paramount concern for me and the whole department,” said David Godlewski, Police Chief at Lakemoor (Illinois) Police Department. “One of the methods we employ in our transparency efforts is the timely release of video evidence. We don’t want to delay the public’s right to information just because we have video evidence that requires a large amount of PII redaction. That is why we have depended upon Veritone Redact to help expedite these requests and maintain the trust we have earned.”

“We’re delighted to provide our industry leading evidence redaction software to the agencies taking advantage of the Bureau of Justice Assistant’s BWC program,” Jon Gacek, head of government, legal and compliance at Veritone. “LEAs across the country have a strong desire to provide information to their constituents, but are often labor constrained in their ability to do so in a timely manner. Veritone Redact, built upon our aiWARE operating system for AI, can accomplish the daunting of PII redaction many times faster, more accurately, and at a significantly lower cost than manual labor alternatives resulting in an effective means for law enforcement leadership to accelerate their agency’s ongoing transparency initiatives.”