BY MARK J. CRAWFORD
State Attorney Brian Kramer thanked Bradford County for its electoral support while detailing added legal costs for the county commission April 1.
The Eighth Judicial Circuit covers Alachua, Baker, Bradford, Gilchrist, Levy and Union counties. The circuit has a budget for each of these counties, a budget from the state and the shared budget for information technology.
The state pays for office personnel as well as “due process expenditures” such as purchasing depositions or witness travel costs. Counties pay for facility costs, including offices, telephones and information technology.
Centralizing IT services helps spend money from the counties most efficiently, Kramer said. The total cost is divided among the counties based on each county’s population.
Prior to his election, Kramer said he served as executive director of the office. From 2012 to now, he said the IT budget has remained stable. Times are changing.
“I think everybody’s aware a lot has actually changed in the criminal justice system. And so, I wanted to kind of give you an overview of where things are changing and why that cost is going to increase in the future.” Kramer said.
The state attorney’s office runs a paperless case management system which is shared with the public defender’s office, allowing information to be transmitted without complication. In recent years, however, the amount of information has grown exponentially.
“One of the things that has changed, and you all may be aware of this, is the amount of what we call digital forensic evidence that exists in the world, which is anything that can be reduced to bits and bytes and be part of a criminal case. So, license plate readers. We have license plate readers all over the circuit, surveillance cameras, cameras in Walmart, Ring doorbell cameras, all those types of stuff that’s all digital forensic evidence. And then you have photographs, which are now, of course, all digital. But most importantly is now almost every agency in within the circuit has fully deployed body cameras,” he said. That’s a recorded video for each officer responding to an incident.
Enter a new digital forensic evidence management system to handle all these files. According to Kramer, it’s called NICE Justice, and instead of manually downloading more than 25,000 individual pieces of evidence a month, the system can do that automatically. This is beneficial to law enforcement sharing evidence, but also citizens, he said. Instead of a witness turning their device over to a detective to be downloaded, they can be emailed a link through which they can submit the photo, video or other file. The file is delivered electronically and indexed to the correct case file.
“So, it’s really sort of a revolutionary piece of equipment for us, but it’s not free,” he said.
This additional cost will also be shared across all six counties based, again based on population. Bradford County is looking at an approximately $23,000 a year increase.
“I wanted you to be aware that this is on the horizon, that it is something that’s necessary and an integral part of the office, and it’s and it does serve to benefit the citizens of Bradford County,” Kramer said.
The decreased cost of local storage on multiple servers will help lower the increase, but an increase is unavoidable.
