The Categories feature provides the ability to create policies, maintain them, and assign them to evidence. Categories include policy settings for evidence retention and restricted access for especially sensitive evidence.
Administrators or other users who are allowed the Category Administration permission can configure and delete categories.
Special and Pre-Configured Categories
Evidence.com includes two special categories:
- Uncategorized — Any evidence that is not assigned to another category is automatically assigned to the Uncategorized category. When you assign a category to evidence, it is automatically removed from the Uncategorized category.
- Pending Review
You cannot delete the Uncategorized or Pending Review category.
When your agency was created, we provided four additional categories that you can edit or delete as needed:
- Officer Injury
- Traffic Stop
- Training Demo
- Use of Force
Evidence Retention Policy
The evidence retention policy determines:
- Whether Evidence.com initiates automatic deletion of evidence assigned to the category.
- How long Evidence.com waits before initiating the deletion of evidence that is not included in a case. All evidence deletions are based on the recording date.
To protect against accidental deletions, administrators can recover files up to 7 days after they are queued for deletion.
This policy applies to evidence only. Cases are never deleted automatically.
Evidence included in a case is exempt from deletion until it is removed from the case.
If evidence is in multiple categories, the longest retention time is used.
Evidence.com sends the following notification emails about evidence queued for deletion:
- Administrators receive a weekly email that summarizes upcoming agency-wide deletions.
- Users receive a weekly message regarding evidence that they uploaded.
For administrators, the Dashboard includes an Upcoming Evidence Deletions section that lists both user-initiated and system-initiated deletions.
Restricted Categories
The Categories feature provides the ability to restrict access to evidence that is especially sensitive. In order to view evidence assigned to a restricted category, users must be on the evidence access list or assigned a role that has the Access Restricted Evidence permission.
By default, all new and pre-configured categories are not restricted categories.
By default, all new roles and all pre-configured roles have the Access Restricted Evidence permission set to prohibited.