CONWAY, SC (WBTW) – All police agencies in both Horry and Georgetown County are being ordered to put all their high-tech data in one place.
Judge Steven John gave the agencies until the end of 2017 to do so but the deadline has been extended another six months. The order came after defense attorneys brought up concerns about not having access to all available evidence.
“Judge John called all of the [police] chiefs and our office in to say you all have to get on the same page,” said Fifteenth Circuit Solicitor, Jimmy Richardson.
Reports, body camera video, dash camera video and data collected from cell phones will all be added to evidence.com.
“Fiber optics are involved, subscriptions to the platform are involved,” explained Richardson. “And to complicate matters, you can put all products into evidence.com but not all the police stations have the same type of body cameras.”
Surfside Beach Police Chief Kenneth Hofmann said the change will help his department but will take them longer to implement because they are such a small agency.
“It’s a game changer,” said Hofmann who explained the old process of getting data to the Solicitor’s Office. “We can’t even fit a lot of these things on DVD’s anymore. We need these giant, encrypted hard drives. So this would give us the ability, through secure internet, to transfer that information to the Solicitors Office.”
Hofmann said they work a lot of cases with nearby agencies like Myrtle Beach Police and Horry County Police and this will help when multiple reports and body camera video are involved.
“It’s just a more effective way than making copies after copies after copies of reports and driving them to Conway,” he added.
Richardson said right now the City of Conway Police, Horry County Police and the Drug Enforcement Unit are all using the site.
He hopes all agencies will be on it in the next three to four months. “It’s difficult but I think once it all gets up and running, I think we’ll say gosh why we’re we doing that 30 years ago,” he added.
