Cell Phone Kiosk and associated hardware for archiving, storage, and duplication of reports.

An important objective of the St. Louis County Police Crime Laboratory is to provide more efficient processing in order to reduce turn-around-time, decrease the backlog and increase the number of forensic samples processed. The Laboratory serves more than one million citizens and provides services to the St. Louis County Police Department as well as 90 municipalities, 56 of which have their own police department.
There are now more mobile devices in the world than people. When it comes to criminal investigations, mobiles have become one of the most important pieces of evidence for investigators to prove communications, associations and locations. The Digital Forensic Unit is a new discipline to the St. Louis County Police Crime Laboratory. In addition to working towards ASCLD/LAB International accreditation for the discipline, the unit is also combating an increase in case load.
The St. Louis County Police Crime Laboratory is requesting funding to purchase a cell phone kiosk. The kiosk will be used to assist detectives and officers that need to extract known items from evidence themselves. The cell phone kiosk would allow the lab examiner to assist the officer or detective in processing their own phone which allows the lab examiner more time to work difficult cases that cannot be processed by the kiosk or a minimally trained detective/officer. This request also includes a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) server to facilitate the storage of evidence and a Linear Tape Open (LTO) drive for archiving all data extracted. The Blue Ray duplicator requested would generate duplicate copies of the final report made by the kiosk including all optical media: CD, DVD, or Blue Ray. Two computers are being requested, one computer will be used to manage the system, conduct review of the files, and archive the files to tape. The second computer will be used by one of the laboratory examiners to replace an aged workstation which will decrease downtime.

ca/ncf.