JusticeText CEO Devshi Mehrotra presented a workshop at the 2021 National Legal Aid and Defender Association (NLADA) Annual Conference on November 10. She sat down with Chief Public Defenders Tracy Paner from Richmond and Joe Schenk from Danville to discuss their experiences utilizing the JusticeText software to analyze high volumes of video and hold police accountable for misconduct.
The full video can be found here, and we have included important snippets from the conversation below.
1 - Astronomical Volume (Tracy).mp4
<aside> 💬 Tracy Paner: It's it's astronomical the hours of body camera that we receive. Um, and it was, I think one of the biggest surprises to us was on one case, even a traffic stop. We can have nine different videos. Uh, and before JusticeText we had to watch all nine, well, probably all nine trying to find out okay, where is the one where they found the gun in the car or where is the one where they, you know, they said why they were stopping the car. Things like that. Um, I had a search warrant case with 11 different videos and I had to watch nine of them to find anybody finding any drugs. So it was really a huge time suck. Uh, and thank goodness JusticeText really helped us uh, reduce that.
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<aside> 💬 Joe Schenk: I can reflect back to a murder case that I had, where there are probably 20 officers on the scene. So we had 20 different versions. Um, but one of the things that, that was helpful in that was as one police officer I recalled was setting up the yellow tape around the crime scene. We had a nice view of every single bystander that had uh, come to the area to, to see what had happened and you could hear people talking about what they saw and what they heard and it enabled us to really have a good idea about possible witnesses in that case. Maybe that could be helpful for us or not so helpful. Um, so, you know, there's a lot of ways to use body camera footage and and JusticeText made it much easier to work with.
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3 - Judge's Reaction (Tracy).mp4
<aside> 💬 Tracy Paner: Okay, I'm going to take a more cynical attack than Joe yet again because of our officers do that all the time. And we have not changed their uh approach to cases. But what has been really amazing is watching the judges reaction to hearing them because we're ready there in court with either the video or a clip to play to impeach the officer and the judges heads kind of explode. And you know, without that video, they're going to always believe what the officer has to say and attorney plays that video shows them that oh they're misremembering or something like that and uh you know that case gets taken care of. But even the next time that the officers in court on another case, the judge is gonna doubt them, it just starts to plant that seed that everything that this cop says, it's not golden.
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<aside> 💬 Joe Schenk: This is one thing though where the body cameras can really hold the officers accountable and it's almost as though you're doing a culture shift in the police department and making them be honest about their reports because an officer, they don't want to look foolish in front of a court, they don't want to look foolish in front of a jury and when the officers know full well that you have body camera footage and that you are prepared to effectively use it in a courtroom setting um they're gonna make that mistake of, of being dishonest with the facts only one time and and they're not going to do it anymore. And and it's not, not just speaking of that trial, but moving forward, I mean, you know, we used to have situations where we would impeach officers at trial, but but then moving forward, they started being a little bit more honest with their, with their reports and honest with their facts because they knew um that the camera was running. And I'd like to think, I mean, I'm not part of any training regimen over the police department, but I'd like to think that the powers that be over there have said, look, just report the facts as they are. You're being recorded, don't make yourselves look foolish by saying something and then being caught, you know, with the camera showing something completely different.
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<aside> 💬 Joe Schenk: The clipping tool is amazing um because it eliminates so many things, you can have a transcript prepared and you can have your written transcript, you can have it tabs, you can annotate on the uh the tool itself and you know exactly where to go. You know when when you get to the point of impeaching a witness, you remember testifying previously at a preliminary hearing, You remember when you said x, y and Z. You know, and you can go right to that point and you can impeach them right on that there is no awkwardness of fumbling through saying judge, give me one second while I cue the video up and and you don't have to worry about not starting on the right spot, you just go right to it and the judge here in Danville at trial, he, he several months ago started asking the participants in trials do not introduce the entirety of a video. He didn't want jurors to be able to review evidence that wasn't properly admitted before the court. And so he wanted us to be able to clip the videos and you know, there's software that can do it. But when we started using Justice Text, this was the all encompassing tool that not only could we go right to that point in trial. You know, we could highlight it, we could play it and we could clip it And it saves it as an MP4 file. So we don't even have to worry about producing a cd right then and there. I can have my paralegal do that at the conclusion of the trial. Uh, and and it's it's much more straightforward process.
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