Page 24 - Security Today, May/June 2020

Government Security
By William Brennan
BSeyond solving crimes, surveillance video can serve as client’s protection against liability
Solving the Challenges
ecurity managers, CSOs and other personnel tasked with mitigating risk at an organization are the first link in a long and vitally important chain. Starting at the surveillance cam- era and running all the way through to a criminal conviction
or acquittal, this chain can be considered critical infrastructure for keeping all individuals safer and more secure.
As a security professional, you choose to purchase and deploy solutions and products based on their ability to solve the problems that are specific to your organization. You need to be able to discover unfolding incidents, alert personnel to problems and identify indi- viduals involved in criminal actions, among other things. Still, your responsibility as the first link in that important chain goes further.
Securing a Conviction
In order to ensure that the information generated by cameras, readers and other devices can be used by law enforcement to get that con- viction, it must be usable and admissible as evidence in a criminal trial. For that to happen, there must be a verifiable chain of custody that goes from your camera all the way through to the presentation of evidence. For electronic security devices, the chain of custody is dependent on data.
Today’s security systems create a wealth of information that is fundamental to identifying and convicting criminals so that the threat they represent is mitigated. For surveillance cameras, this in- formation includes both the video itself and its associated metadata.
Beyond solving crimes, your surveillance video and metadata can also be a vital piece of information when it comes to liability – both your organization’s and your own – in civil lawsuits.
Surveillance metadata contains a wide variety of information relating to the video itself. This may include time and date stamps, location, and any analytics content such as a license plate identified by LPR technology or the identity of an individual verified by facial recognition software. While the video itself is crucial to understand- ing the unfolding of events in perspective, the metadata is equally important for the critical intelligence it delivers to law enforcement – including its ability to verify a chain of custody.
Video information is extremely important as it often provides some of the strongest evidence available to help identify, arrest, indict and convict. There have been many cases over the past years which have turned on surveillance or other video footage. In some situa- tions, the video cements the prosecution’s case, while in others it pro- vides the evidence needed to exonerate an innocent person. Either way, it has become one of the most important avenues of investiga- tion for the visual confirmation it provides.
When surveillance video is used as evidence in a criminal or civil proceeding, it is not enough to simply play the footage for the court. While the video itself may be highly informative and compelling, on its own it may not be considered acceptable as evidence. For it to be
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useful, like all evidence there must be a demonstrable chain of cus- tody for surveillance video.
Chain of custody is a term of art which refers to the verifiable and documented handling of evidence. Every piece of evidence in a crime is subject to tampering, altering or falsifying in some way.
Every Step of the Way
To ensure proper chain-of-custody protocol is followed, law enforce- ment officers are responsible for maintaining and documenting evi- dence at every step of an investigation. They must be able to show who collected, handled, transferred, or analyzed each piece of evi- dence, beginning at the crime scene itself.
The following example will illustrate the importance of this. In 2018, the Supreme Court of South Carolina overturned an earlier con- viction and sentence on a charge of trafficking crack cocaine. After the suspect was stopped by two police cruisers for speeding, cocaine was discovered in a bag inside his vehicle. During the criminal trial, defense counsel was able to show that the chain of custody of the cocaine had been disrupted, and there was not a clear possession between its dis- covery and its placement in the police department’s evidence locker.
After the state failed to provide a complete chain of custody of the ev- idence, the Court ruled that the evidence was inadmissible. The perpe- trator, who had originally been convicted in 2015, walked out of prison.
In any criminal case, a vigilant defense attorney will make chain of custody a central point of their defense if they can establish any doubt or weakness in the chronology or authenticity of evidence. For this reason, it is important to make sure that any security products or solutions you deploy offer the kinds of verifications needed to help confirm the veracity of the data they provide.
For surveillance video, this means that any video taken on-site
GOVERNMENT SECURITY MAY/JUNE 2020
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