Pemberton Township Police Department Selects Veritone as Redaction Software Provider

By AIT News Desk On Apr 24, 2020

The department chose Veritone Redact due to its ease of use, video redaction and advanced audio-to-text transcription capabilities

Veritone, Inc., the creator of the world’s first operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWARE, announced that the Pemberton Township Police Department has selected Veritone and its AI-enabled redaction software, Veritone Redact, to provide transparency of officer interactions with the public, while accelerating the timely release of video and audio evidence requests by the public and other agencies.

“Veritone Redact provides easy-to-use, automated video redaction and audio-to-text transcription capabilities, which enable police departments to redact evidence captured from virtually any audio or video recording device. We’re thrilled to be working with the Pemberton Township Police Department and Chief Jantas.”

After securing a grant to purchase body cameras for all of Pemberton’s officers, the department knew it would also need advanced redaction software. The department planned to use its new body camera footage to share information with the public about crimes under investigation, without tipping their hands to show all of the information they had on a case, or revealing the identities of victims or bystanders. That meant the Pemberton Township Police Department needed to choose carefully: its caseload demanded an easy-to-use, efficient solution that could handle redaction of both video and audio evidence.

“As law enforcement agencies are under increasing scrutiny, we welcome more transparency,” said Chief David Jantas of the Pemberton Township Police Department. “We want to be able to share relevant videos proactively with the public, particularly those from body cams. To make this happen, we needed sophisticated redaction software. Veritone quickly emerged as the right partner –– its Redact solution checked all of our boxes for security, including CJIS compliance and the stability of Microsoft Azure’s cloud. It’s also saving us taxpayer dollars, resources and time.”

The Pemberton Township Police Department deployed its new body cams –– and Veritone Redact –– in early March 2020. And they are already being put to good use. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, officers are among those on the front lines. Where they go, so do their body-worn cameras.

A public records request recently asked for the body camera footage captured by one of the Township’s officers as they walked through the hospital. As the video included a significant amount of personally identifiable information (PII), the Pemberton police could have faced a technical and time-consuming challenge in scrubbing the officer’s body camera footage and making the necessary redactions. However, with Veritone Redact, the department was able to easily redact all PII, enabling them to quickly release the video.

“In addition to cameras worn by officers, police departments nationwide are increasingly using audio and video recordings from businesses, residences, drones and dash cams to gather information about crimes,” said Jon Gacek, Head of Government, Legal and Compliance at Veritone. “Veritone Redact provides easy-to-use, automated video redaction and audio-to-text transcription capabilities, which enable police departments to redact evidence captured from virtually any audio or video recording device. We’re thrilled to be working with the Pemberton Township Police Department and Chief Jantas.”

As the volume of video footage collected by law enforcement and disclosed to defendants and in public information requests continues to increase, Veritone Redact ensures the privacy of innocent people isn’t compromised in the process. Redact automates the process of obscuring both sensitive imagery and audio in video evidence, reducing the time required to redact these files by up to 90% compared with existing manual, frame-by-frame evidence redaction workflows.

With automated head detection, as well as automatic tracking of manually selected sensitive imagery, Veritone Redact tackles massive volumes of audio and video content at incredible speed and efficiency –– freeing up valuable resources and helping agencies comply with privacy and disclosure laws quickly and efficiently.