Met Police bags innovation prize for its Focus media player

Computing examines the technology that picked up this year's Socitm special prize for innovation

Police can update court system with new digital evidence immediately

When police officers present evidence in court, they often have to handle a variety of media such as audio recordings, photographs, CCTV footage or 3D images. This can entail trying to work a number of devices one after the other – a DVD player, an audio cassette player and a PC running PowerPoint, for example – while simultaneously finding the right cassette or DVD or file on the PC.

It’s stressful for the police officers, and the hold-ups can be frustrating for the jury and other members of the court.

Focus Court Presentation System, which has just won Socitm’s innovation award, is a digital evidence viewer and organiser designed by the Metropolitan Police to address that problem.

Before Focus, there was no software that could cope with all the different kinds of media the police needed to present.

“You could view material in its raw form, and you could create bespoke applications using Director or Flash, but they were built on a case-by-case basis,” says David McLinden, a forensics presentation specialist for the Metropolitan police.

The quality of the material in court was often relatively poor. “The problem is getting it out to a jury who is used to watching TV programmes such as CSI.”

Focus was designed to change that. “Our goal was to create a media player in court that would not only make the Met look better when producing their evidence but create less stress for the officers, and better organisation in displaying material,” says McLinden.

The first iteration of Focus, which ran on Windows XP, was released 18 months ago.

The second iteration, running on Windows 7 because of its superior media-handling ability, was rolled out six months ago and introduced new features such as touch-screen functionality.

The beta testing phase was particularly painstaking, says McLinden, because the software had to work completely smoothly the first time it was used in court.

“We had to test one thing at a time. Our first area was to make sure the audio was correct, then we moved onto the video, and made sure the video was correct.”

Met Police bags innovation prize for its Focus media player

Computing examines the technology that picked up this year's Socitm special prize for innovation

The software runs on a PC, connected to two monitors. “One of them is a media control screen with a preview function, and the second monitor is in front of the officer. The image on the second monitor is then displayed to the rest of the court via large LCD screens or smaller monitors, shared one between every two jurors,” says McLinden.

Focus makes it easy to present the evidence in a clear way, so the user can zoom in on a still photo or edit CCTV footage to a manageable length.

What often happens in criminal trials, says McLinden, is that evidence not regarded as relevant one day may suddenly be regarded as essential the following day, this usually means a delay in producing the evidence for the court.

“If you had CCTV footage that was deemed not necessary for the trial, and then considered necessary later on, that would have to go back to the labs, get processed by the labs in a particular format, and sent back to the court room – that slows everything down greatly.”

Focus has changed this – now all the potentially relevant evidence can be saved to a digital format and stored on the PC beforehand.

“Because Focus is a media player that points at media on a hard drive, you can add new media on the fly to dynamically adapt to the case,” says McLinden.

Verison 2 of the Focus Court Presentation System is now used throughout the Metropolitan Police, while version 1 has been made available for free to other police forces in the UK.

“A lot of serious crime cases are using Focus now, and the feedback from officers has been very good,” says McLinden. “It saves the officers time and stress in court, which is valuable because officers who were previously run ragged trying to find the relevant media to display in a court room, can now show it at the click of a button.”