Tulsa Police Introduces New Crime Evidence Technology For Victims, Witnesses

Tulsa Police has rolled out new technology that allows victims or people who witness a crime, to upload any evidence they have, straight to police.

TPD switched to a new body and dash camera system earlier this year, and it has a cloud-based storage system where all evidence, such as surveillance video, pictures, and suspect interviews can now be housed in one place.

Captain Richard Meulenberg says imagine Google Photos or iCloud but strictly for police evidence.

He says TPD collects more than 2,000 pieces of evidence every single day and now it's all stored in one place and can be found at the click of a button.

If your business or home is broken into and you get surveillance video of the thief, it used to take a while to get that video to the police.

"In the past, we'd have to download it to a disk or a thumb drive or some other type of media, and then ingest that into however many systems we had and it was difficult to retrieve it then,” said Meulenberg.

Now, an investigator can simply send a link, by email or text, to the witness or victim, and that person can upload the video or picture from their phone and send it straight to police.

Meulenberg sent us a link to show me how easy it is, and within seconds our picture was in the evidence database with a name and case number attached to it.

"Interviews are on there, so when we go arrest someone for a homicide and we do their interview, it goes on there as well. It is all safe and secure in the cloud,” said Meulenberg.

Meulenberg says the cloud has the highest level of government security.

He says they started using this system in May, but it is already helping investigators solve all sorts of crimes.

"It is going to make our workflow much more efficient and it is going to empower the citizens who are seeing things and working with our investigators to send that evidence to us directly,” said Meulenberg.

"We don't solve crimes by ourselves. We don't work in a vacuum. We need and greatly appreciate the help of the community these crimes."

Captain Meulenberg says this same system will help them fill open records requests quicker for the media, prosecution, and citizens.