Content provided by Code Four
By George Cheng
A detective working one violent crime today might get handed a phone extraction with 40,000 messages, three days of body-worn camera, a recorded jail call, a cell tower dump covering hundreds of phones, 10 years of records history and a stack of social media accounts. The Bureau of Justice Assistance estimates that the average U.S. agency now manages between 2 and 10 terabytes of digital evidence a year. For a long time, each of those evidence types came with its own tool, its own export format, its own specialist and its own backlog. The detective became the thing that held it all together, carrying a fact from the tower dump over to the jail call, then over to the records system, hoping the connection stuck.
Fragmentation like that slows investigations more than any single backlog does. It also points to a different way of thinking about investigative software. Instead of buying one more tool to add to the pile, what if a detective had something closer to an operating system — one place where every evidence source lived, where each source could talk to the others, and where you could ask your questions in plain language?
One layer, not 10 tools
Most investigative software is vertical: One product searches video. Another handles cold-case genealogy. A third parses a phone. Each does its own job well and stays blind to everything else. An operating system works the other way around. It starts from the idea that a case is built out of many kinds of evidence at once, so connecting them becomes the point rather than an afterthought.
That is the thinking behind Code Four INSIGHTS. INSIGHTS is an investigation platform that pulls digital evidence, records and jail-management data, body-camera footage, phone dumps, call logs, recorded audio and case files into a single layer a detective can question directly.
In practice, you drop a phone dump, a set of jail calls, body-cam footage and a records export into one case folder and ask across all of it at once: Who does this person call after each incident? Where do these numbers overlap? Which name keeps turning up in places it has no business being? INSIGHTS pulls out the people, places and phone numbers, builds the timeline and flags the repeats across open cases. When the analysis holds up, it drafts the warrant application or briefing packet from that same set of facts.
Three things set INSIGHTS apart. It processes CSAM and other ICAC material through AI models Code Four trained specifically for that work, so the most sensitive evidence in a case never has to pass through a general-purpose tool. It examines video frame by frame with its own computer vision models. And it connects to an agency’s records-management system no matter which vendor built it. Code Four is confident enough about that last point to guarantee it: If it can’t integrate with your RMS, the platform is free.
The proof is the range
On the South Side of Chicago, investigators have used INSIGHTS to work large youth “takeover” events. They pull open-source and platform records together through law-enforcement request integrations, including Thomson Reuters CLEAR and the Meta and Google law-enforcement response portals, so that scattered posts, accounts and identifiers resolve into named subjects on one timeline.
The real choice for an agency is whether its detectives keep stitching 10 tools together by hand or work from one layer built to do that stitching for them.
In Washington state, the same platform gets pointed at cold cases. Old files, transcripts and records run back through it, and connections the original investigators never saw can surface years later.
At the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in California, the job is jail call analysis. Long stretches of recorded audio get transcribed, mapped and searched for the admissions and relationships that hide inside ordinary conversation.
In Utah, departments including those in American Fork and Spanish Fork run cell phone extractions and cell tower dumps through it, turning raw carrier records and device exports into location patterns and contact networks a detective can actually sit down and read.
That is four different kinds of investigations running on the same platform, and that is really the point. A genealogy tool is no help against a tower dump. A video-search tool cannot touch a jail call. Detectives do not get to specialize that narrowly, though. They catch all of it, and a lot of the time it lands on one case. When each of those jobs lives in its own piece of software, the evidence just sits in its own corner, never connected to anything else.
The detective still runs the case
An operating system does not investigate for you. It handles the carrying: the transcription, the extraction, the cross-referencing, the first draft of the paperwork. That leaves the detective free to spend their hours on judgment, on what a pattern actually means, which lead to chase and how to run the interview. INSIGHTS sits inside a broader set of Code Four tools that follow a case from the street to the courtroom handoff. Code Four Report drafts incident reports from body-camera footage. Code Four Seeker redacts video and personally identifiable information through plain natural-language commands, which no other application on the market does today. Code Four Flash handles field capture of notes, photos and follow-up. And INSIGHTS carries the investigation itself. Agencies cleared just 43.8% of violent crimes in 2024, according to the FBI, and the country adds about 6,000 unsolved homicides every year. Those numbers do not move because software watches video faster. They move when a detective can see a whole case at once, every source connected, early enough to do something about it.
The evidence is not going to stop piling up. The real choice for an agency is whether its detectives keep stitching 10 tools together by hand or work from one layer built to do that stitching for them.
For more information, visit Code Four.
About the author
George Cheng left MIT to build software for police officers. He is a cofounder of Code Four, whose investigative tools now support agencies serving more than 3% of the U.S. population.