When planning to use Evidence Groups, an agency should follow the same guidelines and considerations as when implementing other Groups with the following additions:
- Review policies and requirements for evidence access for your agency’s groups.
- Review your roles and permissions to determine if any changes are needed to the Evidence Management permissions. Create or update the roles and permissions as needed and then assign users to the appropriate roles.
- Assign users to Evidence Groups as needed. Every user can optionally have one Group assigned as their Evidence Group. All evidence recorded by the user is automatically assigned to the user's Evidence Group upon ingestion into Axon Evidence.com.
- Evidence can be manually assigned to an Evidence Group, but Axon recommends that agencies using Evidence Groups assign users that can upload evidence to an Evidence Group to automate evidence assignment and access.
Example Evidence Group Setup and Scenarios
This section provides an example setup and use of Evidence Group functionality.
Example Role Permissions
In this example, the agency has set up three Roles – Patrol Officer, Detective, and Supervisor. For the example, we are interested in the Evidence Management permissions for the Roles.
Role Name: Patrol Officer
- Evidence Management – View and Edit permissions = Only their own
Role Name: Detective
- Evidence Management - View and Edit permissions = Their groups’ & their own
Role Name: Supervisor
- Evidence Management – View and Edit permissions = Their groups’ & their own
- Evidence Management – Edit Evidence Group permission = Their groups’ & their own
Example User Role and Evidence Group Assignments
In this example there are three users, and each is assigned to a different Role and Evidence Group.
- User 1: Role = Patrol Officer and Evidence Group = 5th Precinct Patrol
- User 2: Role = Detective and Evidence Group = Homicide Investigations
- User 3: Role = Supervisor and this user is not assigned to an Evidence Group.
Example Group Membership
In this example, there are two groups with the following membership:
Group: 5th Precinct Patrol
Members: User 3
Group: Homicide Investigations
Members: User 2 and User 3
Evidence Access
Based on the example setup, the following evidence access conditions would exist:
User 3 (Supervisor)
- User 3 has access to all evidence whose evidence group is either 5th Precinct Patrol or Homicide Investigations. This is because User 3's role grants them access to their groups' evidence and User 3 is a member of both the 5th precinct Patrol and Homicide Investigations groups.
- User 3 automatically gains access to all evidence uploaded by User 1 and User 2. This is because User 1's Evidence Group is 5th Precinct Patrol and User 2's Evidence Group is Homicide Investigations. As such, all evidence uploaded by User 1 will automatically have its Evidence Group set to 5th Precinct Patrol and all evidence uploaded by User 2 will automatically have its Evidence Group set to Homicide Investigations. User 3's role grants them access to their groups' evidence and User 3 is a member of both the 5th precinct Patrol and Homicide Investigations groups.
- User 3 can change the Evidence Group for a piece of evidence, because User 3's role grants them permission to edit the Evidence Group for their groups' evidence.
User 2 (Detective)
- When User 2 uploads evidence the evidence's evidence group will be set to Homicide Investigations, because User 2's Evidence Group is Homicide Investigations.
- User 2 has access to all evidence whose evidence group is Homicide Investigations, because User 2's role grants them access to their groups' evidence and User 2 is a member of the Homicide Investigations group.
- User 2 has access to evidence they recorded and evidence with the Homicide Investigations evidence group. This is because User 2 recorded the evidence and their role allows them to view their own evidence. User 2 also has access to this evidence because their role grants them access to their groups' evidence and User 2 is a member of the Homicide Investigations group.
- User 3 also has access to evidence uploaded by User 2, because User 3 is a member of the Homicide Investigations Group and their role allows them to access their groups' evidence.
User 1 (Patrol Officer)
- When User 1 uploads evidence the evidence's evidence group will be set to 5th Precinct Patrol, because User 1's Evidence Group is 5th Precinct Patrol.
- User 1 has access to the evidence they uploaded, because User 1 recorded the evidence and their role allows them to view their own evidence.
- User 3 also has access to the evidence uploaded by User 1, because User 3 is a member of the 5th Precinct Patrol Group and their role allows them to access their groups' evidence.