Safeguarding Officers' Safety, Perspective, Reputation, and Lives
The story behind VIEVU and the inspiration for the first body-worn camera is not an unfamiliar story in policing. It began in the late 90’s, when a Seattle police officer and his partner were attacked in an incident and accused of wrongdoing. Their desire to provide an un-biased account of the events with the advent of the body-worn camera has become a de facto phenomenon to the safety of policing.
For the VIEVU team, the objective video documentation by an officer’s body-worn camera can and has protected officers’ integrity, their mental and emotional well-being, and on many occasions provided a de-escalating effect to the events at hand. The body-worn camera has become an integral part of the law enforcement uniform, and the continued call from communities, governing bodies, police agencies, and the officers themselves to incorporate the camera and its digital data more fully into policing, investigations, evidentiary and social media responses alike has validated its life saving capabilities.
From its founding in 2007 and its first large-scale deployment of body-warn cameras with the Oakland Police Department in 2009, VIEVU has built on its mission of providing strong technical assets to law enforcement. Partnering with Microsoft®, VIEVU was the first company to launch a secure, digital evidence management solution built on the Microsoft Azure Government cloud, offering a fully-hosted digital evidence management solution that is not only fully compliant with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Standards (CJIS), but also user friendly, affordable and has a continually expanding feature set and enhancements to propel evidence management technology further into the future.
Over the last decade, VIEVU’s products and technology have been deployed by thousands of law enforcement agencies in 17 countries. The commitment to quality is evidenced in the trust agencies have placed in the company’s body-worn camera programs, and in an evaluation of body-worn video completed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in which VIEVU received the highest score.