Dutch Forensics Lab Tracks Evidence With RFID

I’ve met some RFID evidence-tracking com­pa­nies at pro­fes­sional sem­i­nars before. I was inter­ested in the tech­nol­ogy years ago, but wasn’t sure about how it could be imple­mented for com­plete, secure, chain of cus­tody records. It would seem they have a lab up and run­ning. It will be inter­est­ing to hear from the peo­ple using it what their take on the sys­tem is, as opposed to the stan­dard bar­code tracking.

Originally posted here.

Dutch Forensics Lab Tracks Evidence With RFID

By Brian Albright

RFID is help­ing author­i­ties in The Netherlands pro­vide real-time evi­dence track­ing and chain-of-custody doc­u­men­ta­tion. The Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI), which man­ages evi­dence from police depart­ments through­out The Netherlands, has deployed a solu­tion that allows item-level track­ing of hun­dreds of thou­sands of items dur­ing foren­sic analy­sis and pro­cess­ing at its facil­i­ties in The Hague.

“The NFI wanted a closed-loop sys­tem to pro­vide a clear chain of cus­tody,” said Alexander de Wilde, RFID Competence Manager at Atos Origin, the Paris-based sys­tems inte­gra­tor that imple­mented the sys­tem. “They will know where each piece of evi­dence was at all times, and that only autho­rized per­son­nel han­dled the material.”

Atos devel­oped the sys­tem using GlobeRanger’s iMo­tion soft­ware plat­form and Edgeware servers, RFID tags from Alien Technology, and inter­roga­tors and anten­nas from Feig Electronic. Woerden-based Phi Data served as Atos’ inte­gra­tion part­ner on the project.

While the sys­tem uses EPC Gen2 RFID tags, the NFI uses its own pro­pri­etary num­ber­ing system.

The track-and-trace pro­gram was devel­oped in coöper­a­tion with the NFI, the police depart­ments, and the Public Prosecution Service (OM) to meet new gov­ern­ment stan­dards requir­ing all pieces of crim­i­nal evi­dence (SVOs) to be trace­able and iden­ti­fi­able. The stan­dards were cre­ated after an inves­tiga­tive com­mit­tee set up by the gov­ern­ment deter­mined that mis­use of sci­en­tific evi­dence had resulted in a num­ber of wrong­ful convictions.

“In the past, if evi­dence was mis­han­dled it could result in a mis­trial or the wrong per­son being sent to jail,” de Wilde said. “Now, they will be able to doc­u­ment that, for instance, the gun they are hold­ing in court is the same one found at the crime scene, that cer­tain tests were per­formed on it, and that it was never any­where near another piece of evi­dence that may have con­t­a­m­i­nated it.”

Each piece of evi­dence is put inside a plas­tic bag, and tagged upon arrival at the NFI facil­ity with an RFID label that also includes human-readable and bar code infor­ma­tion. The label includes a unique num­ber (called a SIN num­ber) that ties the item to a spe­cific crim­i­nal case.

Fifty doors within the facil­ity have been equipped with RFID read­ers and anten­nas to instantly track and log the move­ment of each piece of evi­dence. Workers also scan their RFID secu­rity badges as they enter each secure area, pro­vid­ing a record of which employee moved each piece of evidence.

This data is updated in real time and made avail­able for online view­ing. If evi­dence trav­els out­side des­ig­nated areas, or is taken out of the build­ing, the sys­tem trig­gers audi­ble and vis­i­ble alarms. GlobeRanger’s Edgeware Server fil­ters and inter­prets the reader data, and con­trols the warn­ing lamps and buzzers.

Using the trace­abil­ity data, the NFI is able to pro­vide com­plete chain-of-custody infor­ma­tion, as well as doc­u­men­ta­tion prov­ing that items from sep­a­rate cases did not cross-contaminate each other.

NFI had pre­vi­ously used bar code labels to track evi­dence, but the sys­tem pro­vided only lim­ited trace­abil­ity because it required employee inter­ven­tion to man­u­ally scan and note when an item was moved. With RFID, whole cart­loads of evi­dence can be auto­mat­i­cally scanned as they enter and leave a room or department.

NFI receives and tags approx­i­mately 100,000 items each year, and houses an aver­age of 400,000 pieces of evi­dence at any given time. According to Atos, the orga­ni­za­tion is expected to gen­er­ate more than 800,000 tag reads annually.

Eventually, local police depart­ments will be able to apply the RFID track­ing labels at a crime scene when evi­dence is first col­lected. De Wilde says that the NFI is work­ing with The Netherlands’ 26 police dis­tricts to stream­line this process, as each dis­trict uses a dif­fer­ent num­ber­ing sys­tem for evidence.

“They will even­tu­ally be able to print the labels them­selves or buy pre-printed labels, but they have to use the same num­ber­ing sys­tem,” de Wilde said.

Atos and Phi Data are also devel­op­ing a por­tal scan­ner that will auto­mat­i­cally read the RFID tags and pho­to­graph evi­dence as it arrives at the NFI build­ing. “That way, they will have a record of what con­di­tion the evi­dence was in when it entered the build­ing,” de Wilde added.

Atos began devel­op­ing the sys­tem in the spring of 2007, and it offi­cially began oper­a­tion ear­lier in October. The Dutch Ministry of Justice, which over­sees the oper­a­tion of the NFI, has some pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence work­ing with RFID, hav­ing deployed an inmate track­ing sys­tem at a minimum-security facil­ity in Lelystad.