Beaver County DA launching pilot program to make paperwork easier for police departments

Inside the Beaver County evidence room, rows of cardboard boxes fill the space.

“You have a much more serious case like a homicide and it’s four, five boxes of files, videos, photos evidence. It takes up a ton of space,” said Beaver DA Nate Bible.

That’s per case. For each one, the DA’s office must go through each and every item to copy before turning the discovery over to the defense. Sometimes human errors can be made as they drown in the sheer amount of paperwork.

“There’s countless times, we are looking for a discovery and we will call a police officer and they will say, ‘Yea I dropped it off last Tuesday,’ and we can’t find it anywhere. Whether it got put in the wrong file, misplaced, it got shredded,” Bible said.

To help streamline the process, Bible is launching a pilot program to deliver the discovery electronically. The police departments will have portals to upload everything in one location and the defense can get it easier and faster.

“The big thing is saving the time of the manhours and tediousness of printing all this stuff out and finding the files,” Bible said.

So why haven’t they done it yet? Bible told Channel 11 it came down to cost, but he plans to use a program they already have in-house and money not from the budget.

“I am going to look at taking care of this from my drug task force fund so it’s not any additional cost to the county. It’s certainly something that is a justified use as it’s benefitting all the police departments,” Bible said.

The goal is to get the digital portal up and running in the next month and test it with New Sewickley Police first. If the pilot is successful, the county will roll it out to all Beaver County police departments before the end of the year.

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