Have you been burgled? You call 110, at some point a police officer comes, looks around, asks a few questions and writes everything down with a pen and notepad. After about a quarter of an hour, the law enforcement officer packs up again, gets into the car and drives to the next crime scene.
Sometime at the police station, he types everything into the computer. Such a media break is not only cumbersome, but also very error-prone. Digital tools are intended to make investigators’ work easier and faster.
The BKA and the State Criminal Police Offices are developing new tools, of which we have looked at three. What the three projects have in common is the emphasis on cooperation:
– The INSITU system of the BKA and Berlin police is currently being tested in an agile methodology with 20 teams throughout 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 different specialists to visit a virtual crime scene together and to discuss the findings with each other directly.
– A “holodeck” is being created at the LKA Bayern, on which even up to 100 people can communicate.
What is missing: In the fast-paced world of technology, there is often the time to re-sort all the news and background information. At the weekend we want to take it, follow the side paths away from the current, try different perspectives and make nuances audible.
While INSITU is part of the nationwide 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 everyday police work with INSITU. Stuttgart and Munich, on the other hand, have systems for “worse things” such as 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 optimize and accelerate work processes, enable access to situation reports in real time, and make the exchange of information efficient and loss-free.
The documentation includes a software system consisting of three parts: 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 display a crime scene in 3D, in which you can also integrate point clouds or 3D meshes. A data model represents the documented objects and relationships in an object-oriented hierarchical graph model, where each object is given an identifier and can be linked to other objects.
Classes and attributes are fed from the X-Police standard, another innovation project as part of P20. The federal and state governments have agreed on X-Police as a uniform professional and technical standard for police information exchange, which is to be used in principle in new projects for cross-state police data exchange.
The system structure is server-based with a police access and rights concept (Identity and Access Management, IAM), which will also be modernized as part 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 is to be automatically related to each other and all available data is to be networked in a single crime scene information model. The design of the web application is based on this networking. For example, if a police officer selects an evidence object, he sees all the photos, notes and other information that is available about the evidence object. And if he selects a photo, he can see which evidence object or part of the crime scene the photo belongs to.
If several police officers are on site, they can synchronize the information between their mobile devices in real time thanks to the client-server architecture. Via the web application they can visualize, 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 that they collect on site, but also what is added for the further criminal prosecution process, such as lists of evidence, hand files, photo folders and reports. On the one hand, this is data from the usual types of documentation such as analogue 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, overview maps and geodata, audio, video and text files, DSLR photos.
The BKA is responsible for the overall project management, while Juliane Joswig is responsible for the technical project management at the Berlin police: “INSITU is a project within the huge P20 program. Ultimately, it should be the documentation of the crime scene, with which all 20 German police organizations, including customs, work. 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. To home page
