Have you been burgled? Call 110, at a certain point a policeman arrives, looks around, asks a few questions and writes everything down with pen and notebook. After about a quarter of an hour, the law enforcement officer packs his bags again, gets into his car and drives to the next crime scene. Sometimes at the police station, he types everything into the computer. Such a media disruption is not only cumbersome, but also very error-prone. Digital tools are intended to make the work of investigators easier and faster. The BKA and the State Criminal Police Offices are developing new tools, three of which we reviewed.
Announcement
What the three projects have in common is the emphasis on cooperation: The INSITU system of the BKA and the Berlin Police is currently being tested in an agile methodology with 20 teams all over Germany in operational service and as soon as it is up and running, it will enable digital documentation in multi-user operation. CAVE of the LKA Baden-Württemberg enables a team of several specialists to visit a virtual crime scene together and discuss the findings directly with each other. At LKA Bayern, a “holodeck” is being created, on which up to 100 people can communicate.
What’s missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, there’s often time to sort through all the news and background information. On the weekend we want to take it, follow the back paths away from the current, try different perspectives and make the nuances audible.
While INSITU is part of the national digitization project “P20” and is being developed for the whole of Germany, CAVE and the holodeck are independent projects for Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Another difference is that the BKA and the Berlin Police are developing support for the daily work of the police with INSITU. Stuttgart and Munich, on the other hand, have systems for “worse things” like major disasters or “at least” murders – systems that probably (hopefully) don’t have to be used on a daily basis.
INSITU: Digital Crime Scene Recording
INSITU is digital crime scene documentation with mobile devices on site (lat. “in situ”). This should streamline and accelerate work processes, enable access to real-time situation reports and make information exchange efficient and loss-free.
The documentation includes a three-part software system: an Android app saves the data in a local NoSQL document store and, if necessary, synchronizes the data with the central INSITU server via an encrypted connection. In the web application, users can use the browser to evaluate digital crime scene data. With it you can search data spatially and semantically, write reports and visualize a crime scene in 3D, in which you can also integrate point clouds or 3D meshes.
A data model represents the objects and relationships documented in an object-oriented hierarchical graphical model, where each object is assigned an identifier and can be linked to other objects. The classes and attributes are powered by the X-Police standard, another innovation project under P20. The federal and state governments have agreed on X-Police as a uniform professional and technical standard for the exchange of police information, which is to be used in principle in new projects for the exchange of police data between states.
Announcement
The system structure is server-based with a police access and rights concept (Identity and Access Management, IAM), which was also modernized in the context of P20. Operation is designed on the Police Service Platform (PSP) in the data house ecosystem. This is hosted by the BKA and is BSI compliant.
At INSITU, all on-site information must be automatically correlated with each other, and all available data must be networked into a single crime scene information model. The design of the web application is based on this network. For example, if a police officer selects a piece of evidence, he sees all available photos, notes, and other information about the piece of evidence. And if you select a photo, you can see which piece of evidence or part of the crime scene the photo belongs to.
If there are multiple police officers on site, they can synchronize information between their mobile devices in real time thanks to the client-server architecture. Through the web application they can view, search and evaluate crime scene data; they can also add data and information from external sources such as digital cameras to the crime scene model. This includes not only the information they collect on the spot, but also what is added for further criminal prosecution, such as evidence lists, hand files, photo folders and reports.
On the one hand, this is data from the usual types of documentation such as analog photos, notes or sketches. In addition, there is data from new technologies such as laser scanners or 360° cameras, i.e. panoramic images, point cloud scans, crime scene geometry, panoramic maps and geographic data, audio, video and text files, DSLR photos.
Overall project management is in the hands of the BKA, while Juliane Joswig is responsible for the technical project management of the Berlin police: “INSITU is a project within the huge P20 program. Ultimately, it should be crime scene documentation, with which all 20 German police organizations work, including customs. And investigators should enjoy using it,” she says. Her team includes people from different police departments: for example, a police officer and someone from the homicide squad.
