Police Records

Mike Snell is a records specialist with Spokane Police Department. For years, Mike relied upon expensive and hard to use redaction software to redact thousands of records each year. Then he switched to CaseGuard.

“Think about the time saved, which is money saved, as well as ‘wear and tear’ on the employee doing the redactions. 5000 separate keystrokes to redact a video, or 20? Which would you prefer? Case in point – a video that took me 4 hours to redact using the ‘old’ method, took me an hour and 5 minutes using CaseGuard.”

Ease of Use

Mike was initially skeptical about how much CaseGuard could help him. Having tried multiple redaction software applications before, he wasn’t hopeful about CaseGuard.

My experience with CaseGuard started in March of 2017. They had been working with my agency since September of 2016, but I didn’t come into the mix until March. We had a demonstration provided, and I was blown away. I remember thinking to myself ‘This can’t possibly work that well – this is a demo, of course they’re going to show their software under ideal conditions!’

Mike soon received his own version of CaseGuard. His team asked him to evaluate it. He wasn’t prepared for the results. According to Mike, he was tasked to do time trials to estimate how long it took to redact videos using his old method versus using CaseGuard. According to Mike, “CaseGuard is faster at the actual redacting process, more accurate, easier to use, and used far less keystrokes, 100% of the time. Think about the time saved, which is money saved, as well as ‘wear and tear’ on the employee doing the redactions. 5000 separate keystrokes to redact a video, or 20? Which would you prefer? Case in point – a video that took me 4 hours to redact using the ‘old’ method, took me an hour and 5 minutes using CaseGuard.“

Reliable customer service and collaboration

For Mike, one pain point with using his previous vendor’s software was that they were not available on a reliable basis. His requests for help were often left unanswered, and it was clear the provider didn’t want to hear about ways they could improve their software. That changed with CaseGuard.

The folks I have been in contact with, are very responsive to requests for assistance, extremely knowledgeable, friendly, they have and continue to help me numerous times throughout this process. They are also willing to listen to customer ideas about how to make things better with the program.

More than a redaction software

While automatically redacting sensitive data from audio was the most obvious benefit Mike saw with CaseGuard, they also received many other benefits.

• Reliable redaction even in tough conditions: Working with other software sometimes led to mixed results for Mike, especially when working with low-lit videos. CaseGuard changed that. “We used real world body camera videos and we used videos with a variety of light levels, action levels. CaseGuard is at least 3-4x better than what I was using previously, for redaction.”
• Easy project updates: Mike often has to add additional files to a redaction project as more footage or information comes in from the department. With CaseGuard, they’ve been able to add the necessary files and get them processed in moments.

I didn’t think it was possible to save thousands of hours by using automatic redaction, but I was clearly wrong! Since purchasing CaseGuard, our Department has gotten out thousands of additional requests annually.

I truly cannot possibly say enough good things about this product, and my experiences with them. I am thrilled with my agency choice to use CaseGuard.