Fort Huachuca Police Advance Mobile Efficiency with Panasonic Solution
A new, integrated video evidence management solution is enabling Fort Huachuca military law enforcement officers to improve efficiency, advance their mobile connectivity capabilities, and better capture vital video evidence.
A United States Army installation with a population of roughly 6,500 active duty soldiers, 7,400 family members and 5,000 civilians, Fort Huachuca is located in southeast Arizona and serves as the home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM)/9th Army Signal Command. The base’s police force is charged with ensuring the safety and security of personnel, dependents, visitors and physical property alike.
However, until recently the Fort Huachuca law enforcement officers struggled due to major limitations of its mobile evidence capture systems. Originally equipped with various DVR-style camera recording systems, the law enforcement officers of Fort Huachuca lacked a unified video collection system and were required to pull hard drives from their cars in order to download and re-file each video for review. In addition, officers were forced to use three different processes in order to set up, download and transfer video files to an external hard drive for review as part of an evidence management process that was both time-consuming and inefficient.
Recently, Fort Huachuca’s Sgt. Christopher Shafer turned to DataSource Mobility, a full-service technology solutions provider with a dedicated government division, VetSource Mobility. As a Panasonic preferred partner, VetSource Mobility helped Fort Huachuca evaluate new video capture solutions that would offer higher quality video and solve file management challenges.
“It was imperative that the new system be more robust, user-friendly, scalable and have the ability to wirelessly transfer the video onto file. We needed to be able to quickly search the video content and identify possible evidence,” said Sgt. Shafer.
Comprehensive Evidence Capture and Management
After a successful pilot, Fort Huachuca chose to deploy an in-vehicle solution for its squad cars comprised of Panasonic Toughbook Arbitrator 360° digital video systems, fully rugged Toughbook H2 tablet PCs and robust, semi-rugged Toughbook 53 laptops. Mounted with Gamber Johnson docking stations, the new in-car solution features embedded Gobi modules to provide officers with wireless broadband data transmission in real-time.
Using Panasonic’s integrated evidence management solution Fort Huachuca officers are now able to capture digital evidence, log information and update case files at the scene of an incident, saving considerable data entry and transmission time each week. In addition, officers can also search videos, download the necessary files, and convert them to Windows Media files seamlessly for quicker processing at headquarters. As a result, Sgt. Shafer has been able to boost department processes and spend more time protecting and serving the community.
“The next phase of our Toughbook H2 deployment will involve our officers taking the unit outside of the car and onto the scene,” said Sgt. Shafer. “They can take pictures of the scene, use the barcode reader to scan licenses and the Spillman and CAD software will automatically populate that data into the file.”
To learn more about the Fort Huachuca’s solution deployment, download the full case study from the Panasonic Solutions for Business website.
