How the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office Cut a 6-Hour Body Cam Redaction to 25 Minutes with CaseGuard AI

Six Hours of Redaction on a 15-Minute-Long Video

The call itself was routine: two people who live together, an argument over the laundry, nothing dangerous. But the body cam video from the responding deputy featured him holding two ID’s, one in each hand, constantly moving in and out of frame; and every instance of those IDs had to be redacted before the footage could be released. James “Dez” Desmond, a Senior Records & Body Camera & Audio Specialist IV at the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, had spent six hours on just those 15 minutes of video.

Then he ran the same clip through CaseGuard. The AI redacted 80% of it on the first pass, and Dez finished the video in 25 minutes.

That test set off a chain of events. It took CaseGuard from a trial on a borrowed workstation to the ultimate redaction platform for the agency’s records division and media relations unit, with detectives now coming to the team for transcripts. This is how that happened.

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About the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office

Industry: Law enforcement

Location: St. Johns County, Florida

Company size: About 1,000 employees, roughly 450 of them sworn (including the jail)

Records team: Four people, up from two through most of 2025

About the agency: SJSO finished its contract with Axon and began rolling out body worn cameras in March 2023. Before that, the records division’s most technical work was extracting 911 calls and radio traffic, logging them, and sending them out. Once cameras reached every deputy, public records requests took off. Requests now arrive through a web-based portal, GovQA, and are routed to specialists by media type: body cam, audio, or documents.

Dez has spent close to ten years at the Sheriff’s Office. He handles most of the body cam redaction and backs up audio and documentation redaction.

The challenge: A records surge, a two-person team, and a tracker that kept dropping out

Dez remembers the early days clearly. In the first year with body cams, the agency had only about eight months of data. Then, in his words, 2024 brought “almost 100%” more requests, and 2025 was “a bit of a bear too.”

The numbers from 2025:

• 1,603 citizen requests, plus requests from other agencies
• 8,368 videos sent out over the course of the year
• Two people handling the work until about October
• 904 requests by midyear alone, a mix of citizens and agencies including the ATF, DEA, and U.S. Marshals Service

Over one stretch of the summer, Dez had 117 requests in his queue, covering more than 300 videos. Most requests are traffic crashes, often from law firms. The rest come from private citizens, homeowners associations, neighbors, and other agencies.

No Room to Say No: The Strictness of Florida’s Sunshine Laws

Florida law leaves the records team very little flexibility:

• No denying requests. “In the state of Florida, any citizen can request any documentation. And we cannot deny that request.” The exception is an active investigation.
• No asking why. Requesters can even stay anonymous. “It’s not our question to ask why, it’s just a process.”
• Statute decides what comes out. Florida law dictates what must be removed. One example is the MDT and MDC screens inside deputies’ vehicles.
• Payment sets the queue. The team invoices each request through the portal and works them in the order payments arrive. If a requester doesn’t respond within ten days, the request is closed as “no response.”
• The agency is on the line. As Dez puts it, “you have to slow down and be thorough because the agency is on the line for that.”

Where Their In-House Redaction Tool Fell Short

The team had been using the redaction suite built into Axon’s evidence platform. It got them started, but as volume grew, the limits showed:

• Object tracking dropped out. It would follow a target for only about 20 or 30 frames.
• Any change broke it. A camera shift or a jump in frame rate meant stopping, resetting, and picking the work back up by hand.
• Network updates stalled work. Constant updates left the team “pretty much dead in the water.”
• Manual work became the default. The team ended up redacting frame by frame.

Then there was the unpredictability of the footage itself. “Sometimes a five-minute video has so much in it that you’re spending an hour on it,” Dez says. “But then there’s hour-long videos where you’re spending five minutes on it.”

The Human Cost of Poor Redaction Infrastructure

For a small team, the surge had a cost beyond hours. “You’re losing good people because they get burnt out,” Dez says. “Everyone has a threshold for that.”

And there was no quick fix: “You can’t run modern-day records divisions like you did in the ’90s.”

The solution: test videos and a coalition

The agency had looked at other options before, and one priced per user at a level the agency couldn’t share across a team. CaseGuard changed the conversation for four reasons:

1. Incredible time-saving potential. Dez was immediately able to cut the time spent redacting BWC video for a case from 6 hours to just 25 minutes.
2. It covered video, audio, and documents. The records team handles all three, and CaseGuard handles all three in one platform.
3. The price worked for a public agency. When the county bid came back, “the price point came back and that pleased everybody.”
4. The support went beyond the software. Dez says that when the records team hands feedback to CaseGuard’s developers, they work on it. “We’ve never had that treatment before.”

Dez is clear about what came before: “We utilized Axon’s redaction suite. That got us going and then we outgrew it.”

Getting started with CaseGuard

Nothing about the rollout was automatic. It took a test, a coalition, and some persistence.

1. Test-running on a borrowed machine. The records unit didn’t have hardware that could run CaseGuard, so IT built a test workstation from spare parts. The team affectionately called it the “Franken computer.” It sat on Dez’s desk, monitor plugged in, and it was enough to prove the point.

2. Three tests that made the case. Beyond the 15-minute video, Dez ran a 66-page document with a large number of names and emails to remove. It took a colleague four hours line by line. CaseGuard’s search-and-redact finished it in 15 minutes. Then he dropped in a 911 call and had the caller’s name, address, and phone number redacted “before I even had a chance to blink.” A small tweak, a 500-millisecond buffer ahead of each redaction, caught the digits of a phone number that would otherwise start too early.

3. A coalition, not a solo pitch. Dez’s supervisor saw that CaseGuard could serve more than records. It could handle personnel files in HR, insurance and HIPAA material in risk management, and public-facing content in media relations. The team brought each unit in, then took the case up the chain of command. The first conversation, though, was with IT: could the agency house this in-house, and did it have the computers to run it?

4. Hardware and a county bid. Two new NVIDIA-powered workstations, originally on order for another county unit, were redirected to the records team. Because of the county’s purchasing rules, the purchase went to bid. The bid came back approved.

5. One day of training, open to others. CaseGuard’s account managers came onsite and trained the team in a single day. SJSO also invited neighboring agencies, including the St. Augustine Police Department, to sit in.

As Dez puts it, “I’ve always said since day one, this is not mine. This is ours.”

Before and After Implementing CaseGuard: What actually changed

1. Body cam redaction

Before CaseGuard: Object tracking dropped after 20 to 30 frames, so specialists reset and redacted by hand. A 15-minute civil-call video took about six hours.

After CaseGuard AI: In the first test, the AI redacted 75 to 80% of the same video and Dez finished in 25 minutes. Day to day, Dez says the team is “taking a 30 minute video and redacting in ten minutes with 100% accuracy.”

2. Documents

Before CaseGuard: A 66-page document was redacted line by line and took a colleague four hours.

After CaseGuard AI: Search-and-redact handled the same document in 15 minutes. For staff who love Adobe-style redaction, CaseGuard also supports manual redaction, so they can work the way they always have while they warm up to the faster way.

3. 911 audio

Before CaseGuard: Extract the call, log it, and listen through for the caller’s name, address, and phone number.

After CaseGuard AI: Dez drops in ten 911 calls at a time, sets what to detect and what to redact, and lets the AI run with the transcript alongside. Because he knows the order dispatchers ask their questions in, he only needs to listen at the moments that matter. “Audio redaction is just like body cam, except you don’t have to watch anything. You just got to listen.”

4. Transcripts for detectives

Before CaseGuard: Transcripts went out to a stenographer to be certified.

After CaseGuard AI: “It takes us two or three minutes to process that transcription,” Dez says, then the team exports it as a Word document. “We’ve done 95% of the work.” The detective adds names and checks the details. One recent example: a detective without Mandarin fluency handled a case where a witness spoke through a phone on speaker. CaseGuard transcribed and translated the conversation, and the detectives got back a video with subtitles.

5. Workload and staffing

Before CaseGuard: Two people handled thousands of videos. That summer, one specialist carried 117 requests at once.

After CaseGuard AI: The workload dropped 40% in about a month of learning the platform on the fly, and kept dropping. The two heaviest queues now sit around 30 requests each, with the other two operators carrying roughly 8 and 20 to 22. The team has grown from two to four people.

What was CaseGuard’s Impact?

• A 15-minute body cam video: about 6 hours down to 25 minutes in the first trial test.
• A 30-minute video redacted in about 10 minutes with what Dez calls 100% accuracy.
• A 66-page document: 4 hours down to 15 minutes.
• Personal workload down 40% in about a month, while still learning the software.
• Queues down from 117 requests to about 30 for the two heaviest operators, in a seasonal lull. The team expects the next wave.
• Transcripts in 2 to 3 minutes, with 95% of the work done before the detective picks them up.
• A team that doubled from two to four people, backed by the data the records unit had been tracking since 2025.
• A platform that’s spreading. Records and media relations use CaseGuard today, and detectives and investigations are coming to the team for transcripts and translations.

Going Beyond Just the Numbers

The numbers matter, but Dez keeps coming back to the process behind them.

The data made the case. Dez’s advice to other records units is to track everything: how many videos, when they were requested, when they were released, and who asked. “You have to just present that to the people and keep presenting it.” When command said no, he waited, added six months of data, and asked again. The data the team had kept since 2025 helped convince management to add staff.

The team shaped the product. The agency took CaseGuard’s watermark feature and repurposed it to show duration on exemption forms. The CaseGuard developers built it out for them. “It’s CaseGuard showing us and then us showing CaseGuard.”

The training bar is low. “You can train somebody on CaseGuard in 30 minutes, too. But you can do way more.” Dez says an Axon background is an easy springboard, with one caveat that applies everywhere: “You’re only as good as your statute knowledge.”

The work is heavy, and the team knows it. Records staff review disturbing material every day. Dez says the agency takes its people’s wellbeing seriously, and he stresses it himself: “You have to take care of your people.”

Running a records unit through a surge, in Dez’s words

On making the case internally:

“Don’t accept no for an answer, or accept no for an answer that day. But come back, reformulate, and you will get what you want. Sooner or later your command will wake up.”

On why a unified front works:

“Find somebody who’s in the trenches that’s doing the work. Get them to become your champion. Coordinate with other units.”

On going back to the old tool once the trial ended:

“It’s like going from a tricycle to a jetpack, and then back to a tricycle.”

On what he’d tell other agencies:

“I could drop anything in here and redact it so quick and put my reasonings in.”

Ready to get ahead of the surge?

If your records team is still redacting body cam footage frame by frame, the math probably looks a lot like SJSO’s did. Requests you can’t refuse, a small team, and a tracker that can’t hold a target.

CaseGuard Studio handles video, audio, images, and documents in one platform. Whether you’re dealing with body cam footage, 911 audio, or document requests, the process looks the same: upload, let the AI run, review, deliver.

Book a demo and talk to our team, and we’ll walk you through what your current redaction workload would look like automated.