About the California DMV
The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is a critical state agency tasked with managing vehicle registration, licensing drivers, and promoting road safety throughout California. The DMV also investigates fraud, misconduct, and other irregularities related to vehicle registration and licensing.
With over 170 field offices, the DMV serves millions of residents across the state, ensuring the integrity and legality of motor vehicle operations. These responsibilities involve extensive field investigations and internal audits, where large volumes of digital evidence are collected and managed.
Challenges
For years, the California Department of Motor Vehicles faced significant hurdles in managing its digital evidence for investigations. Officers collected evidence files locally, storing them in different locations on local drives—such as CDs and thumb drives—scattered across different offices throughout California. This decentralized storage made it difficult to track down relevant evidence when needed, often taking considerable time and effort to categorize, label, and make the evidence searchable. Due to the disconnected nature of storage, collaboration between field investigators, especially those from different counties or cities, was hard.
Files had to be physically retrieved or transferred between locations, wasting both time and resources. This disorganized approach hampered investigations and raised concerns about maintaining a clear chain of custody and protecting sensitive data.
Moreover, field investigators didn't have the rights to access certain confidential evidence held by Internal Affairs, creating gaps in transparency and accountability. Simultaneously, maintaining a clear chain of custody was a persistent challenge, as was the need to protect the privacy of sensitive information collected during investigations.
Solution
To tackle these challenges, the California Department of Motor Vehicles implemented the VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System on their Azure Government Cloud. This system provided the DMV with a centralized, secure repository that could store and manage evidence collected through dashcams, bodycams, and CCTV cameras.
With this central repository in place, investigators no longer needed to worry about loose CDs or thumb drives, and evidence could be accessed remotely from any DMV office across California. This new capability not only saved time but also improved coordination and collaboration between field investigators spread across cities and counties. The system's automated transcription feature, combined with advanced metadata management, allowed investigators to easily search within video files based on spoken words, further simplifying evidence retrieval.
Additionally, the role-based access control (RBAC) feature enabled the DMV to restrict unauthorized access to confidential content, maintaining the privacy of sensitive information.
For the Internal Affairs division of the California DMV, the solution provided a customizable portal where they could have their own workflows, security protocols, and logs to maintain the chain of custody, ensuring evidence remains admissible in the court of law.
Impact in a Nutshell
- Eliminated scattered evidence files and streamlined evidence management by storing and managing evidence in a centralized place.
- Automated transcription improved search accuracy and reduced manual effort.
- Protected sensitive information from unauthorized access using robust access control capabilities.
- Helped maintain evidence integrity and accountability by tracking all interactions/activities with digital evidence.
- Allowed the internal affairs department to have easy, tailored access to relevant evidence with a separate evidence portal.
About VIDIZMO DEMS
VIDIZMO DEMS is an IDC-recognized AI-powered digital evidence management system that helps organizations securely store, manage, analyze, and share digital evidence from a centralized repository.
