A nonprofit that supports law enforcement on unsolved violent crimes is adding an AI platform to its investigative toolkit, with the goal of helping sort through years — and sometimes decades — of case evidence.
The Cold Case Foundation is partnering with Veritone to use Veritone’s AI-powered Investigative Digital Evidence Management System (iDEMS) in its work on cold cases.
For many agencies, older investigations come with a familiar challenge: evidence scattered across formats that don’t easily connect. Case files may include paper reports, recorded interviews, surveillance footage and more recent digital evidence, often stored in separate systems.
The foundation said the platform will be used to bring those materials into a single, searchable system, allowing investigators to review and compare information more quickly.
“The sheer volume of unresolved cases, combined with insufficient agency resources and the massive amount of associated data, hamper efforts to solve these cases,” said Butch Rabiega, the Cold Case Foundation’s AI program director.
According to the announcement, Veritone’s system can transcribe older audio recordings and analyze video, making it easier to search across case materials. One example described involves linking a vehicle mentioned in a 1990s-era interview to more recent surveillance footage.
The Cold Case Foundation works alongside law enforcement agencies on investigations involving homicides, missing persons, unidentified remains and serial sexual assaults. Officials said they expect the technology to support that work by helping investigators revisit evidence that may not have been fully analyzed at the time.
