Effective evidence review is an important step in the pursuit of justice. In the age of digital evidence, law enforcement agencies and legal departments often struggle with managing and analyzing an overwhelming volume of audio and video evidence required for investigations and case preparation.
Handling this evidence without leveraging technology like auto-transcription brings a significant challenge. A study conducted by the UK government estimates that it takes police an average of 63 hours to generate a pre-case file. For multiple comprehensive case files, we can assume this figure to be much higher.
Law enforcement agencies in the US continue to reel in from the aftereffects of staffing and retention issues. Resource-intensive processes involved in evidence review, such as manual transcription of evidence only add fuel to the fire. It diverts valuable personnel away from critical investigative tasks, affecting overall efficiency and case turnaround times.
Luckily, transcription technology has taken a turn for the better in recent years. These days, multilingual transcription and translation have helped bridge the language barrier in investigations. This significantly cuts down the time required by law enforcement and legal professionals by only requiring a quick review of the generated transcript—especially in a melting pot of cultures and languages like the US.
In this blog, we’ll go over exactly how automatic transcription of evidence impacts the evidence review process. But first, let’s go over the differences between automatic and manual transcription.
Auto-Transcription vs Manual Transcription of Evidence
How do auto-transcription and manual transcription differ for digital evidence? Well, for one, manual transcription requires you to sit down and listen to audio or video recordings. You will then be required to write or type out the content verbatim.
The benefit of manual transcription is that it ensures reasonable accuracy. However, the process can be incredibly time-consuming and resource-intensive. You may have to pause the video and audio file constantly and rewind it to it to catch missed words or phrases. Additionally, manual transcription is prone to human error, such as typos, omissions, or misinterpretations.
Auto-transcription, on the other hand, leverages advanced speech recognition technology like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to convert audio and video files into text format automatically. This process significantly reduces the time and effort required for transcription, allowing investigators and legal professionals to focus on analysis and case-building rather than mundane transcription tasks.
Challenges of Not Using Automatic Evidence Transcription
As you can imagine, manually transcribing hours of audio or video evidence is a daunting task for anyone. But it’s especially taxing for professionals who are on a time crunch to close cases quickly. Here are some of the challenges you may face with manually transcribing digital evidence.
Time-Consuming Process
One of the biggest challenges of manual transcription is the sheer amount of time the process takes. Besides interrogation tapes, call recordings, surveillance footage, and other digital evidence, the rise of the adoption of technology in police departments has led to growing amounts of body-worn camera and dashcam footage.
To find an example of this, you don’t need to look any further than the Pasadena Police Department. Since 2016, the police department has deployed more than 300 body cameras and estimates that officers amass an average of two hours of footage per shift. Five years since this deployment, they have accumulated over a million pieces of digital evidence in the form of recordings and documents.
The industry standard for transcribing audio is a 4:1 ratio. This means that the average person takes about four hours to transcribe one hour of audio. In the scenario above, you can imagine how this can become incredibly overwhelming. The time required to do so can hinder officers in performing other critical duties.
It’s a similar case for legal professionals. From depositions and court proceedings to interrogations and surveillance footage, lawyers have to meticulously review hours, if not days, of recorded material for case review and preparation.
The consequences of spending inordinate amounts of time on transcribing can be dire. Delays in case progression, missed crucial details, and increased costs—these are just a few of the potential pitfalls they can face.
Chance of Human Error
Because of the tedious nature of manually transcribing files, the task can be prone to human error. And this potential for mistakes is magnified when dealing with large volumes of audio or video data. Factors such as fatigue, distractions, and individual interpretation can lead to inaccuracies, omissions, or misrepresentations of the original content.
It’s a well-known fact that occupational fatigue and cognitive load can start setting in after the 8th hour of the shift. In fact, research has shown that more time spent on tasks has directly led to lower productive output.
It makes sense if you think about it intuitively. Imagine sitting at your desk and looking over thousands of videos and audio files to transcribe them. After a while, it will all get tiring quickly, and you might find your eyes and ears glazing over and missing key details.
Of course, automated transcription may not be entirely accurate either. However, it offers a significant advantage in terms of speed and efficiency. While transcription tools may struggle in some areas, they can rapidly produce a first draft that can then be reviewed and corrected by human transcribers.
Inefficient and Resource-Intensive
Manual transcription can be an inefficient and resource-intensive process. It demands significant time and human resources. As you can imagine, this diverts valuable resources away from core responsibilities.
For law enforcement agencies, this means fewer officers available for patrol or investigative work. In legal departments, it translates to increased costs and slower case turnaround times.
Beyond the financial implications, the inefficiency of manual transcription can also impact case outcomes. Delayed access to critical evidence can hinder investigations and compromise the ability to build strong legal cases.
Benefits of Automatic Transcription of Evidence
It’s clear that manual transcription can come with certain flaws. Various law enforcement and legal personnel can use automatic transcription of evidence to help streamline their transcription process. Let’s explore some key auto-transcription benefits:
Optimized Workflows
There is a major element of inefficiency that comes with manually transcribing evidence files. It’s not just the fact that it takes time away from other duties; it also serves as a distraction and disruption to the workflow. Constant switching between transcribing files and catering to other tasks can hinder focus and productivity. Besides, transcribing files requires a quiet and focused environment, which may not always be ideal in a bustling police department.
Manual transcription can also create bottlenecks in the investigative or legal process. Delays in obtaining transcripts can impact case progression, hinder collaboration among team members, and ultimately compromise case outcomes.
On the other hand, the automatic transcription of evidence can optimize the workflow by allowing processes to be run in parallel. An officer can schedule the transcription of a lengthy audio or video file and tend to other tasks. Meanwhile, the transcription can be processed in the background and finished in parallel.
Expedited Turnaround Time
Law enforcement and legal professionals often rely on third-party transcription services to outsource their transcription duties. This is done for a variety of cases, such as investigation reports, testimonies, recorded calls, and other audio and video files.
However, these services can take anywhere from several hours to days, depending on factors such as the length of the audio, the number of files, and the size of the transcription company.
Even in cases where an official transcript is needed to be generated by a court reporter or legal professional, it might be helpful to have an automatically generated transcript. For example, attorneys often have to transcribe evidence files to prepare for depositions, cross-examinations, and court hearings. Using auto transcription for digital evidence helps get out a transcript quickly for evidence review and note-taking.
Cost Savings
Police departments have to operate within a specific allotted budget that accounts for staffing, equipment, and other administrative costs. Contracting a transcription company, using the services of a legal transcriptionist, or hiring an in-house transcriptionist adds additional costs that may be beyond the scope of what was budgeted.
While obtaining transcriptions via these methods is unavoidable for official purposes such as court submission, it may not be worthwhile for less critical tasks like evidence review. This is true especially since costs for transcription services can vary depending on the length of the audio, number of speakers, time of delivery, verbatim transcription, and timestamp add-ons.
On the other hand, automated evidence transcription offers a cost-effective alternative. By eliminating the need for human transcriptionists, departments can reduce labor and contractual expenses significantly. The software and resources required for automated transcription often come with a lower upfront cost compared to hiring and training staff.
Multi-Lingual Transcription
With over 350 languages spoken in the US, it becomes a difficult task for law enforcement and legal professionals to transcribe digital evidence. To effectively transcribe multi-lingual evidence, you would have to enlist the services of a linguistic expert or foreign language transcriptionist for every language. Then, there are also the challenges of finding one on short notice.
This is one area where automated transcription excels. Advancements in transcription technology have allowed transcription tools to recognize and transcribe several languages with relative accuracy.
For cases involving non-English speakers, automated evidence transcription can be invaluable in quickly obtaining crucial information from interviews, interrogations, and other evidence. In such events, accurate and timely transcription of legal proceedings can significantly impact case outcomes.
Interested in learning more about linguistic challenges in evidence management? Read this blog on multi-lingual solutions for digital evidence management.
How Auto-Transcription Helps with Evidence Review Efficiency
If your day-to-day duties involve examining several pieces of digital evidence, then you know the importance of efficiency. Anything that can help you speed up the process is a worthwhile consideration. That’s why technology like auto-transcription should be a major consideration for your evidence review process. Let’s explore some reasons how:
Generates Insights for Case Preparation
Auto-transcription can significantly enhance case preparation by providing valuable insights. By analyzing the transcribed text, investigators and legal professionals can quickly identify key points, potential contradictions, and relevant information.
A study on interrogations by the North Carolina School of Law found that the average length of an interrogation was 16.3 hours. With a case consisting of multiple interrogations, funneling down to the necessary information can be a hassle whether you’re an investigator or a legal professional.
The weeks and months it takes to analyze the evidence and build a strong foundation for a case are critical. Automatic transcription helps highlight these insights at the forefront, which allows them to be easily accessible.
Instead of only leaving the most critical or necessary evidence to be transcribed, legal professionals and law enforcement personnel can generate transcripts of the majority of their digital evidence. They can even conduct searches within the transcript to identify specific keywords, phrases, or names. This capability significantly reduces the time spent manually reviewing hours of footage and helps build a stronger case that effectively utilizes all the digital evidence.
Helps with Redaction Processes
Cases often come with digital evidence that contains a lot of personally identifiable information (PII). If this evidence is released under a record request or is submitted to the court, then it becomes a part of the public record.
Laws like California’s AB-748 and others require that law enforcement agencies redact personal details to protect the privacy of individuals. It’s the same case for legal professionals who have to comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Manually redacting audio and video files is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Auto-transcription can significantly streamline this process by simplifying large video and audio evidence into a searchable text format.
This allows redaction teams to quickly identify and remove PII, ensuring compliance with legal requirements and protecting sensitive information. It also serves as the basis for automatic redaction tools that use transcription to identify PII in an audio or video file.
Makes Evidence More Accessible
Sometimes, digital evidence contains files that are difficult to interpret without additional context. For instance, audio recordings might capture conversations in foreign languages or with heavy accents, making it challenging to understand the content.
There may also be instances where the recording was made in a noisy environment, or there is a lot of crosstalk, which may make it difficult to discern individual voices. Instances like these can leave a generous room for interpretation, which is not something that can be afforded in critical scenarios like case preparation.
Auto-transcription can help by providing a text-based version of the audio, making it easier to identify key information and understand the context of the conversation. Additionally, transcripts can aid in identifying potential inconsistencies or contradictions within the evidence, contributing to a more thorough and accurate analysis.
Assisting Report Writing Processes
Documentation and paperwork can often take up a significant portion of a law enforcement officer’s time. According to a report by Nuance, 38% of surveyed law enforcement professionals said they spent 2-4 hours a day on paperwork. Another 45% of respondents from the same survey said that report writing was the most significant drain on their productivity.
It’s the same case for legal professionals who only spend, on average, about 2.3 hours out of their 8-hour workday focusing on billable duties. The rest of their time is taken up by administrative tasks required by their role. This can include, among other things, evidence reviewing and summarizing processes.
By automating the transcription process, law enforcement and legal professionals can quickly extract key details, quotes, and timestamps, reducing the time spent manually reviewing audio and video evidence to help with report writing. For instance, law enforcement officers regularly conduct Priority Ranked Video Audit (PRVA) and body-worn camera audits for quality assurance, compliance, and training purposes.
Auto-transcription can significantly streamline this process by providing searchable transcripts of the footage, making it easier to identify potential issues, best practices, and areas for improvement. They may also use auto transcription to create official transcripts for sharing between agencies or with the court.
You can read more in our blog post about how to securely share digital evidence with prosecutors and other agencies.
Quick Evidence Search and Retrieval
Locating specific information within vast amounts of audio and video evidence is a time-consuming challenge faced by law enforcement and legal professionals. Manually searching through hours of recordings can be inefficient and impractical. It hinders case progression, increases operational costs, and makes any future compliance reviews and audits a nightmare.
The inability to quickly pinpoint crucial details within evidence can lead to compromised investigations and delayed case resolutions. Unfortunately, not all evidence libraries are neatly organized. Many agencies struggle with managing the sheer volume of digital evidence, often resulting in disorganized and inaccessible media libraries. (Curious to know more about the consequences of unorganized libraries? Check out this blog post on why you need to organize your video library.)
Auto-transcription addresses this issue by generating transcripts of all video and audio files, which can then be indexed. These indexed transcripts enable rapid identification and retrieval of specific information through keyword searches.
For example, searching for a specific suspect’s name, a particular topic, or a key phrase uttered during an interrogation can be done in seconds rather than hours.
Save Time and Create Efficiencies with Evidence Auto-Transcription
When the clock is ticking, and justice is on the line, law enforcement and legal personnel need any bit of help they can get. As digital adoption sweeps the country, the amount of digital evidence has skyrocketed. And with it, so has the need to store it, manage it, share it, and leverage it for case outcomes. For most, the answer to these needs lies in evidence auto-transcription.
Slowly but surely, police departments are recognizing the role of technology in helping them carry out their duties. Tools like automatic transcription and digital evidence management systems help carry out swift justice.
These technologies are transforming how investigations are conducted, evidence is managed, and cases are prepared for prosecution. By quickly transforming audio and video into searchable text, evidence transcription accelerates investigations, improves case preparation, and streamlines the entire evidence review process.
Looking for a place to store all your digital evidence in a centralized repository and generate automatic transcription of evidence files? Digital evidence management software like VIDIZMO DEMS offers an end-to-end solution to securely store, manage, analyze, share all your digital evidence in one centralized location.
Try VIDIZMO DEMS free for 7 days, or contact sales to learn more about how we can help you. You can also read our blog post on what other features to look for in a digital evidence management system.
People Also Ask
What is auto-transcription?
Auto-transcription is the process of automatically converting audio or video content into written text using speech recognition technology.
Where is evidence transcription needed?
Evidence transcription is crucial in many sectors, primarily in law enforcement and legal proceedings or any other field that requires accurate and accessible records of audio or video content.
How can you transcribe digital evidence?
Digital evidence can be transcribed manually, by outsourcing to transcription services, or by using automated transcription software.
What kind of transcription technology is being used today?
Modern transcription technology employs advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to accurately convert speech into text.
What are the auto-transcription benefits for evidence review efficiency?
Auto-transcription significantly improves evidence review efficiency by enabling quick searches, accurate time-stamping, easy identification of key points, and reduced manual labor.
