Las Vegas Metro police inks 10-year digital-evidence-management deal with Motorola Solutions

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department recently signed a 10-year, $18.98 million contract with Motorola Solutions, which will use its CommandCentral software suite to provide an integrated, end-to-end digital-evidence-management system that is unique in the marketplace, according to company officials.

Adam Schwartz, director of Motorola Solutions’ digital-evidence-management solutions, said the Las Vegas police department will benefit from a “first-of-its-kind” capability that is enabled by the fact that the agency will be leveraging multiple Motorola Solutions offerings that are being integrated with the contract.

“It’s providing an entirely new workflow and landscape for how digital content is managed. It’s truly unique to the market,” Schwartz said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It ingests any number of disparate systems.

“It really doesn’t matter where the data is coming from. It’s providing a seamless access and management of all of that content. The kicker is that it integrates deeply into our [PremierOne] records systems, which Las Vegas also has. Las Vegas now has the full suite of our software offerings, in that they have our 911, our CAD, our records and now they’re using our consolidated digital-evidence management platform to make sense of—and provide actionable intelligence from—all of their data.”

This capability is critical for public-safety agencies, many of which are struggling to make sense of the exploding amounts of digital evidence—video, photos and data—that is becoming available, according to Jim Wolfinbarger, national sales director for Motorola Solutions soft enterprise and CommandCentral software for intelligence-lad public safety,

“The challenge with all of this … different content is not just the act of managing it, but the real important component of correlating it—having it tightly integrated with a CAD event number that’s been generated to ensure that there is consistency with how an agency would correlate data together,” Wolfinbarger said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It’s really providing a synthesizing point for all digital content to be joined together with records and CAD, as well as bringing together information from the public through tip lines and crime reports.

“I think we’re going to see more and more of this around the country, where agencies are having to find a direct solution that extends beyond what traditional records management is today.”

Under the new system, Las Vegas police will use CommandCentral Vault to collect and store digital evidence, CommandCentral Aware to aggregate related digital evidence from multiple platforms and CommandCentral Analytics to compile historical data that can be depicted in numerous graphic elements.

Some of the benefits of the new system include the ability for authorized Las Vegas personnel to access all of the disparate public-safety platforms—from computer-aided dispatch (CAD) information to video and crime records–via single-sign-on access, Schwarz said. Motorola Solutions developed this functionality after receiving numerous customer request for it, particularly from district attorneys, he said.

“It’s becoming clear in the marketplace that we are meeting a meeting a need that is very recognized; there just hasn’t been a solution to the problem—until now,” Schwartz said.

“This a unification of all these systems to pull these disparate systems into one vault,” Schwartz said. “Any file type can be stored in [CommandCentral Vault] and now accessed from across the agency’s judicial partners—whoever you share that case file or evidence with. That’s the real difference [from the existing Las Vegas system].”

In addition, the end-to-end nature of the solution means that Motorola Solutions is able to provide tight security on digital evidence and ensure that evidence meets all chain-of-custody requirements needed to be useful in court, Schwartz said.

“Our top priority is building mission-critical solutions that drive safer cities, and a major part of that is ensuring all evidence tied to an incident is readily accessible,” Larry Mabry, Motorola Solutions vice president of sales, said in a prepared statement. “Motorola Solutions’ Digital Evidence Management System allows police departments to better allocate their time by automating backend processes, and it takes evidence management one step further by building trust in the community through transparency around evidence chain of custody.”