In recent years, universities have seen a growing need to address incidents ranging from minor violations to serious criminal activities. As the volume of video evidence generated from sources like campus surveillance, mobile phones, and body-worn cameras continues to rise, colleges face new challenges in managing and analyzing this data effectively.
However, leveraging AI-powered digital evidence management systems allows universities and campus police to accelerate investigations, streamline processes, and build greater trust within their campus communities.
When a crime or significant incident occurs on a college campus, time is of the essence. Historically, campus security and investigators relied on manually sorting through hours of video footage, reviewing images, and trying to piece together fragmented evidence. Today, with advances in AI, these processes can be automated, reducing the time it takes to analyze and organize evidence from days or weeks to minutes or hours.
Colleges can implement intelligent digital evidence management systems to centralize video and other forms of evidence—such as mobile phone footage, body-worn cameras, dashcams, and building surveillance—into one platform. This allows investigators to easily manage, archive, organize, and share key evidence, building stronger cases more quickly.
One of the biggest advantages of AI-powered evidence management lies in its ability to pull from multiple, disparate sources and house everything in one central location. This not only simplifies evidence gathering but also provides a seamless downstream workflow that includes redaction, suspect identification, deep analytics, and the identification of people and vehicles of interest.
Here are five other ways AI-powered digital evidence management can help improve campus security:
1. Streamlining Investigations With Automated Workflows
Colleges frequently deal with incidents involving a large amount of video data, such as student misconduct, theft, or assault. The amount of time needed to review this evidence manually can be overwhelming for campus police or security teams, but AI technology can drastically cut down the workload by automating much of the process.
AI tools can sift through hours of footage in minutes, using machine learning algorithms to flag key moments or people of interest. For example, if investigators are trying to identify a suspect, AI can scan through all available video footage from multiple sources and find matching individuals based on specific physical attributes—such as clothing, body type, or even behavior patterns—without the need for manual review.
Certain AI solutions even offer the ability to track and identify individuals without the use of PII, protecting the identity and privacy of students and staff members.
Not only does this save time and resources, but it also allows university investigators to focus on higher-level decision-making and case-building rather than getting bogged down in tedious manual tasks. For campus police departments, this means investigations can move forward faster, helping to resolve cases and address incidents before they escalate.
2. Multi-Source Evidence Collection
One of the unique challenges of campus environments is the variety of sources from which video evidence can be drawn. A single incident might involve footage from building surveillance cameras, mobile phone recordings, body-worn cameras used by campus security, and even dashcam videos from campus vehicles. Without a system to aggregate these sources, investigators would be forced to gather and review the footage piecemeal, a process prone to delays and errors.
AI-powered systems enable colleges to consolidate evidence from these diverse sources into a single, centralized platform. This digital repository allows investigators to easily locate and cross-reference video clips from different angles, timelines, or sources, building a more complete and accurate narrative of events. Having all evidence in one place also ensures that nothing is overlooked, and investigators can track key evidence more efficiently.
3. Redaction, Identification, and Deep Analytics
In addition to evidence collection and organization, some AI-powered systems may also offer sophisticated tools to analyze and process the evidence in ways that traditional manual methods simply cannot. For example, automatic redaction tools can obscure personal information or blur faces in footage, ensuring compliance with privacy laws and regulations, especially when sharing evidence with external parties.
AI’s ability to identify persons of interest is also a crucial feature for campus investigations. Using advanced pattern recognition, AI can match people or vehicles across multiple video feeds, linking various pieces of evidence that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.
This is especially useful in large, multi-location campuses where suspects or key witnesses may move between different areas. And—as previously stated—some may be able to do this without breaching privacy concerns.
Beyond simple identification, AI tools can provide deeper analytics, such as heat maps of activity patterns, behavior analysis, and even predictive insights. These analytics offer campus investigators insights into patterns that could indicate future threats or potential areas of risk, allowing universities to take preemptive measures to ensure campus safety.
4. Enhancing Campus Safety and Transparency
AI-powered digital evidence management systems are faster, more efficient, and contribute to a greater sense of safety and transparency on college campuses. By automating workflows, universities can conduct thorough investigations quickly, providing clarity and closure to students, faculty, and the public.
At a time when trust in institutions is vital, the ability to act quickly and efficiently during investigations builds confidence in the university’s ability to protect its community. In the event of high-profile incidents, such as assaults or safety breaches, these tools allow campus police to quickly gather evidence, analyze it, and provide real-time updates on the investigation’s progress.
Moreover, digital evidence management platforms facilitate the secure sharing of evidence with external agencies, such as local law enforcement or legal teams, without compromising the integrity of the case. This transparency is critical in maintaining public trust and demonstrating accountability, especially in incidents that attract widespread attention.
5. Safeguarding Privacy While Improving Investigation Speed
One of the major concerns with the increasing use of AI in investigations is privacy. Universities have a duty to protect the personally identifiable information (PII) of students and staff while ensuring that investigations are conducted efficiently.
Thankfully, AI systems designed for public safety prioritize the protection of PII. Features like redaction and anonymization help ensure that only relevant data is shared, and facial recognition technologies can be avoided in favor of more privacy-conscious alternatives.
By focusing on key physical attributes—such as clothing, gait, or objects carried by a person—AI tools can identify individuals without relying on facial recognition, thus protecting privacy while still enabling rapid analysis of evidence.
This makes AI-powered systems effective and compliant with ethical standards, helping universities navigate the fine line between privacy and public safety.
Conclusion: A Smarter Approach to Campus Safety
As college campuses face increasing demands to manage a growing volume of digital evidence, AI-powered digital evidence management systems offer an essential solution. These systems enable investigators to gather, organize, and analyze evidence from disparate sources quickly and efficiently, drastically reducing the time it takes to conduct thorough investigations.
In doing so, universities can resolve incidents swiftly, allocate resources more effectively, and build greater trust within their campus communities. With AI at the helm, campus security is no longer just reactive—it can be proactive, intelligent, and protect what’s most important: those who deserve to feel safe on campus.
