No, the company is instead taking a crack at a problem that inevitably crops up for any agency that suddenly finds itself intaking massive quantities of video: storage and cataloguing.
On Oct. 23, Mark43 announced a new digital evidence management system (DEMS) to follow its existing computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and records management system (RMS) products. Chief Executive Officer Scott Crouch said the DEMS will be capable of instantly uploading footage from body-worn cameras and other recording devices and then automatically matching it with crime logs and case files in other systems — with the aim of providing that functionality with other vendors' products as well.
“Interfaces that provide functionality like automatic matching always require the cooperation of other vendors,” Crouch wrote in an email. “At this stage in development, we cannot say for sure if our DEMS will work with RMS and CAD systems from other vendors, but this is, of course, our goal. To the extent that other vendors are willing to interface with our API and their technology is capable of providing this functionality, auto-matching will be supported.”
The Mark43 DEMS is hosted on the Amazon Web Services GovCloud, which is FedRAMP authorized.
The product is in early-stage development and isn’t yet available for commercial sales, but the company is working with some of its established law enforcement customers to build it out. Crouch said he’s inviting more agencies to partner with on developing the DEMS at the ongoing International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia.
The automatic matching functionality has been a goal of Mark43’s for some time, according to Crouch.
“The benefit of having built our industry-leading RMS from scratch in the last few years is that we were able to future-proof it,” Crouch wrote. “Our system is designed to handle matching between digital evidence with reports. We do this with physical evidence via our (property and evidence management system) already.”
The company built the DEMS to be hardware-agnostic and offers application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow its products to work better with solutions from other companies. Crouch said Mark43 is also planning on developing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for its offerings. The company has been working on drawing in AI talent.
“Our team is working to incorporate it in the right way,” Crouch wrote. “We’re focused on what is achievable with current advances and what it could look like in the future. Our biggest asset is the talent of our team, and Mark43 has drawn some of the best minds from Google, Facebook, Palantir and the armed forces to work on our platform.”
The product launch puts Mark43 into a competitive space with existing vendors offering body cam video storage, including the largest camera-selling vendor, Axon. Others in the market include Vievu, Motorola Solutions, QueTel and Wolfcom.
