Last year the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Police Department had a problem with its evidence analysis. It had plenty of video of recent crimes, including a rash of bank and credit union robberies, but the video was useless.
“It all looked fantastic at the scenes, but when we got the evidence downloaded, we couldn’t view it because we didn’t have the proper player or the proper Codec,” Det. John Helmsing says. “And even if we could view it, often times because of compression it would look much poorer than it did in the native environment.”
One of the department’s deputy chiefs became aware of all the problems that the major crime investigators were having with digital evidence. That chief asked Helmsing to move over to the digital forensics unit and search for solutions. One of Helmsing’s first priorities was finding a better way to handle video evidence.