Every source.
Every format.
Every byte sealed.

Body-worn cameras are the largest single source of digital evidence in modern policing, and the most logistically demanding. A mid-sized department with 600 officers wearing cameras generates between 4 and 8 terabytes of video data per day. At end of shift, officers dock their cameras at charging stations — and the upload begins. In most departments, this upload is a bottleneck. Legacy docking stations process cameras sequentially, not in parallel. Upload speeds are limited by network bandwidth that was never designed for terabyte-scale data transfer. Files sit in queue for hours or days. During this window, the evidence exists on the camera but not in the evidence management system — creating a custody gap between capture and ingestion that defense attorneys increasingly exploit. Vault's BWC Ingestion engine eliminates this gap. Docking stations process cameras in parallel, with each camera's footage immediately streamed to the ingestion pipeline upon connection. The SHA-256 hash is computed by the docking station's TPM (Trusted Platform Module) hardware — not by software that can be compromised — ensuring that the integrity seal is applied at the physical point of transfer, not after the file has traversed the network. Metadata is extracted automatically: officer badge number from the camera's registered identity, shift assignment from the CAD integration, GPS coordinates from the camera's location services, and case associations from the officer's activity log. The system processes 184 cameras in a single docking cycle in under 90 seconds — not because each file is small, but because the pipeline is parallelized across storage nodes that each handle a subset of the incoming data. For departments deploying in-field streaming (live body-cam feeds transmitted over LTE/5G), the ingestion engine captures the stream in real time, applying integrity seals to fixed-duration segments as they arrive — meaning that evidence is sealed and in the chain of custody while the encounter is still occurring.

Surveillance footage is simultaneously the most abundant and the most difficult evidence to ingest. A single urban intersection may be covered by municipal CCTV cameras, Flock Safety license plate readers, HALO gunshot detection cameras, private business surveillance systems, and residential doorbell cameras — each operating on a different platform, exporting in a different format, and retained for a different duration. In most investigations, detectives physically visit each location, request footage from each system operator, receive it on a USB drive days later, and manually upload it to whatever system they use. The evidence arrives without chain of custody, without integrity verification, and without any guarantee that the footage has not been edited between the camera and the detective's hands. Vault's CCTV Integration engine replaces this manual collection with direct API connections to the major surveillance platforms. When a detective opens a case and defines a geofence and time window — "all cameras within a 3-mile radius of 4th and Main, between 9 PM and midnight on March 14th" — the engine queries every connected system, retrieves matching footage, applies SHA-256 integrity hashes at the point of retrieval, and ingests the footage directly into the case file. No USB drives. No site visits for footage collection. No manual uploads. The footage enters the system with the same cryptographic seal and chain of custody initiation as body-cam footage from a docking station. For private surveillance systems not connected via API, Vault provides a secure upload portal where business owners and property managers can submit footage directly — with identity verification, upload-time hashing, and automatic case association based on the detective's request reference number.

Mobile device extractions are among the richest and most complex evidence types in modern investigations. A single smartphone extraction can yield 40-50 GB of data encompassing call logs, SMS and MMS messages, encrypted messaging app content (WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram), email, browsing history, app usage data, GPS location history, Wi-Fi connection logs, Bluetooth pairing history, photographs with EXIF metadata, videos, voicemails, deleted media recovered from unallocated disk space, social media content, financial transaction records, health data, and application-specific databases. This data arrives from forensic extraction tools — Cellebrite UFED, GrayKey, MSAB XRY, Magnet AXIOM — in proprietary formats that must be preserved exactly as exported to maintain forensic validity. Most evidence management systems cannot natively handle forensic extraction bundles. The extraction lands on a forensic workstation's hard drive, is manually copied to a network share, and eventually uploaded to the evidence system — each transfer introducing a potential custody gap and integrity risk. Vault's Mobile Forensic Ingestion engine accepts extraction bundles directly from the forensic workstation in their native format — UFDR, GrayKey JSON, XRY exports, AXIOM case files — without requiring format conversion that could alter the data. The complete extraction is integrity-hashed as a single unit (preserving the relationship between the extraction bundle and its constituent files), then indexed for searchability. Investigators can search across phone content — "all text messages mentioning 'warehouse' between January and March" — without extracting individual files from the bundle, maintaining forensic integrity while enabling rapid investigative review. Deleted media recovered from unallocated space is flagged separately and linked to its recovery methodology, ensuring that the provenance of recovered evidence is documented for court challenges to forensic technique.

Drones have transformed crime scene documentation, accident reconstruction, and search operations. A single DJI Matrice 350 flight over a crime scene produces 4K video footage, high-resolution still photographs, GPS-locked orthomosaic maps that enable precise distance measurement, thermal imaging that reveals heat signatures invisible to the naked eye, and in specialized deployments, LiDAR point clouds that create three-dimensional models of the scene accurate to centimeters. This data is extraordinarily valuable — and extraordinarily vulnerable to mishandling. In most departments, drone footage lives on the pilot's SD card until someone remembers to upload it. The SD card sits in a desk drawer. The footage is copied to a laptop for review. The laptop is not part of the evidence management system. By the time the footage reaches the case file, it has been handled outside any custody chain for hours or days. Vault's Drone Capture engine integrates directly with UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) platforms. When the drone lands and docks, its footage is automatically uploaded through the same parallel ingestion pipeline as body-cam footage — with SHA-256 hashing at the docking station, GPS flight path data embedded in the evidence metadata, and FAA Part 107 compliance documentation (pilot certification, airspace authorization, flight log) attached as associated records. The flight path itself becomes evidence — documenting exactly where the drone flew, at what altitude, what sensors were active, and what area was covered, allowing the defense to challenge or verify the completeness of the aerial survey. For departments using real-time drone streaming (live video transmitted from the drone to a command post during active operations), the ingestion engine captures the stream with the same segment-level sealing used for body-cam live feeds.

Some of the most important evidence in modern investigations comes not from law enforcement equipment but from civilians. A Ring doorbell camera captures a suspect's vehicle two hours before a burglary. A bystander's cell phone video records the critical seconds of a use-of-force incident that body cameras missed. A neighbor's home security system shows a person of interest walking past at the time of the crime. This evidence is often the most difficult to ingest with integrity intact. Civilians email video clips to detectives. They hand over USB drives at the precinct. They post footage to social media, where it is compressed, metadata-stripped, and shared thousands of times before investigators can preserve it. Vault's Community Evidence Submission portal provides a public-facing, secure upload interface where civilians can submit evidence directly to a case. The submitter creates an account with identity verification (or submits anonymously with a tracking number), selects the case or incident their evidence relates to (or submits without a case number for detective triage), and uploads their files. At the moment of upload — before the file reaches the server — a SHA-256 hash is computed client-side and transmitted alongside the file. The server re-computes the hash upon receipt and verifies the match, confirming that the file was not altered in transit. The evidence enters the Vault pipeline with the same integrity seal, metadata extraction, and chain of custody initiation as any law enforcement source. The submitter receives a receipt confirming their submission with a reference number they can use to follow up. For social media evidence preservation, the engine integrates with forensic social media archival tools (Hunchly, Social Media Examiner) to capture posts, comments, and media with full metadata, URL, and timestamp preservation before the content is deleted or modified.

Beyond cameras and phones, a growing ecosystem of IoT devices generates evidence that most management systems cannot ingest. Gunshot detection systems (ShotSpotter/SoundThinking) produce acoustic event records with precise geolocation and timestamp data. Vehicle telematics from patrol cars record speed, location, and driving behavior during pursuits. Interview room recording systems capture audio and video from suspect and witness interviews. 911 dispatch systems archive call recordings and CAD (Computer-Aided Dispatch) logs that document the sequence of events from initial report through officer response. Environmental sensors in evidence storage rooms log temperature, humidity, and access events that document storage conditions for biological evidence. Wearable biometric monitors on officers record physiological data during critical incidents. Each of these data streams contains potentially critical evidence — and each is typically stored in its own isolated system with no connection to the central evidence repository. Vault's IoT Integration engine connects to these automated sources through standardized APIs and data feeds. ShotSpotter acoustic alerts are ingested with geolocation, timestamp, and confidence score. Interview room recordings are automatically linked to the case number entered by the detective at the start of the session. 911 recordings are associated with the CAD event number and linked to the responding officers' body-cam footage. Vehicle telematics are matched to the officer's body-cam timeline, creating a synchronized view of what the officer saw and what the vehicle was doing at each moment. Every automated data source enters the Vault pipeline with the same integrity sealing, metadata extraction, and chain of custody initiation as human-collected evidence.

The daily evidence cycle in most departments follows a predictable pattern: evidence accumulates throughout the day, and the ingestion system must process the entire day's collection overnight before the next shift begins. For a department generating 4-8 TB of body-cam footage daily — plus CCTV pulls, drone captures, forensic extractions, and civilian submissions — the overnight processing window is the critical throughput constraint. If the pipeline cannot process today's evidence before tomorrow's evidence begins arriving, the backlog compounds. Within weeks, the department is days behind on evidence ingestion, creating a cascading failure where evidence is neither searchable nor discoverable because it has not yet been processed into the system. Vault's Bulk Ingestion engine is designed for the overnight window. Massively parallel processing distributes incoming evidence across a horizontally scalable storage cluster, where each node independently performs SHA-256 hashing, metadata extraction, format identification, case association, and AI pre-classification (face detection, license plate identification, transcript generation for audio). The pipeline processes 10+ TB per night for a mid-sized department and scales linearly — a department generating 20 TB can add processing nodes without architectural changes. For historical archive migrations — when a department transitions from a legacy system and needs to ingest years of previously collected evidence — the Bulk Ingestion engine processes the archive as a background task without interrupting live evidence ingestion. Supervisors receive morning audit reports documenting every item ingested overnight: total volume, source distribution, items flagged for review, and any ingestion failures requiring human attention.

Evidence arrives in formats that no single system natively supports. Body-cam footage is typically MP4 or MOV, but older systems produce proprietary formats that require vendor-specific players. CCTV systems export in H.264, H.265, or proprietary containers that vary by manufacturer — Genetec exports differently from Milestone, which exports differently from Avigilon. Mobile forensic extractions arrive in UFDR, JSON, SQLite databases, and proprietary case files. Drone footage may be DNG raw stills, ProRes video, thermal TIFF overlays, and LAS/LAZ LiDAR point clouds — from the same flight. Audio recordings span WAV, MP3, FLAC, and proprietary 911 recording formats. Documents include PDF, DOCX, scanned TIFF images requiring OCR, and handwritten field notes photographed on a detective's phone. The Format Intelligence engine handles all of it. At ingestion, each file undergoes automatic format identification based on file headers (not file extensions, which can be incorrect), codec analysis for audio and video files, container inspection for multi-stream media, and metadata extraction appropriate to the format type. The original file is always preserved in its native format — Vault never transcodes evidence, because transcoding alters the binary content and invalidates the integrity hash. Instead, the engine generates playback-compatible proxy files that allow any evidence item to be viewed, streamed, or searched in a standard web browser — while the original forensic file remains untouched in the repository. For files in proprietary formats that cannot be proxied (certain legacy CCTV exports, for example), the engine identifies the required playback tool and flags the item for the operator, rather than silently failing to render the evidence. Metadata normalization standardizes timestamps, GPS coordinates, device identifiers, and officer/case associations across all source types into a unified schema — enabling cross-source search and timeline construction regardless of how each source originally structured its metadata.