In the first part of this exclusive two-part interview, Rob Gerber, a law enforcement veteran and solutions engineer with Veritone, discusses challenges of the digital era, how they impact the work of police and collection of evidence, and how departments have had to adapt. Part 2, coming soon, will examine potential solutions.
As digital evidence continues to grow at an exponential rate, law enforcement agencies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance investigations, streamline workflows and combat crime more efficiently. AI-powered tools can sift through vast amounts of digital data – such as surveillance footage, social media activity and mobile device records – helping investigators uncover critical leads faster than ever before.
In this Q&A, we speak with Rob Gerber, a public safety solutions engineer with Veritone and former homicide investigator, to explore how AI is being used to enhance investigative work, the challenges agencies face in adopting these technologies, and what the future holds for AI-driven law enforcement.
Police1: Rob, before we start, can you tell me a little bit about your background before you came to Veritone?
Rob Gerber: I was in law enforcement the last 10 years or so. I just retired out of law enforcement and came straight to Veritone. But during that time, I was primarily at Antioch PD in northern California.
I worked in a few different roles. I initially did patrol, but then I did undercover investigations, mostly gang investigations. I was lead investigator on the gang unit and then a homicide investigator for the last five years of my career. During that time, I led a bunch of task forces and wiretap operations because my primary specialty was gang investigations. A large portion of that included cell phones, social media dumps, wiretaps of those social media accounts and just the digital evidence to solve those gang-related crimes.
Why did you get into law enforcement in the first place?
Gerber: I got into law enforcement just to help people. I was working in the prison system in the health care side of things and saw myself helping people by solving crimes.
There was a lot of violence I was seeing, and I wanted to be the solution to that. When I got in, the only thing that made sense was trying to solve those crimes and bring justice to families and [trying] to deter some crimes so that less people were victims of violence. And that was kind of what carried me through my whole career.
CHALLENGES IN POLICING
Tell me about your time at Antioch PD. What were some of the overall challenges the department faced during your tenure?
Gerber: During my 10-plus years at Antioch, some of the biggest challenges were staffing – lack thereof. At the time I was leaving, we were assigned twice as many detectives as we actually had on staff. So it was definitely a difficulty throughout my entire tenure, the lack of staffing and being able to have the resources to handle the types of crime and the amounts of crime that we were dealing with, as well as just not keeping up with the technology of the criminals.
I primarily investigated gang-related activity, which included things like wiretaps and large-scale technological investigations. And keeping up with the technology of the bad guys is one of the hardest things to do, especially with short staffs.
CHALLENGES IN MODERN INVESTIGATIONS
As a homicide investigator, what were the biggest challenges you faced in investigations? Which aspects of traditional investigator processes were the most time-consuming or resource-intensive?
Gerber: The biggest hurdle to overcome during my time was just the fact that [the] traditional policing of “go find the suspect and interview them, take them to jail and close the case” is kind of a thing of the past.
The biggest challenge is just keeping up with the technology of your criminals. That includes going through cell phones, large iCloud or cloud server downloads, social media downloads and then large, large amounts of surveillance video. That digital evidence becomes a huge percentage, if not the vast majority, of the evidence that you’re actually collecting these days. Then reviewing all of it and going through it to find the leads becomes a huge portion of your investigations.
THE GROWTH OF DIGITAL EVIDENCE
Over your time working in law enforcement, how did that amount of digital evidence and the sources of that digital evidence collection grow?
Gerber: When I started, there weren’t body cameras. There were barely any surveillance cameras unless it was at a bank or something similar. Not every single criminal had a cell phone in their pocket at the time, and the amount of data you were receiving from one was very limited – maybe some messages, a couple of photos.
By the time of my retirement, which was only a few months ago … every single criminal had a cell phone or two on them during the crime. Those cell phones were anywhere from 500 gigabytes to a couple terabytes of data based on cloud storage and other things. And then every single crime included surveillance video from dozens of cameras – hours and hours of video.
We’ve got body-worn camera and video now, so you’ve got so much more data to go through, which is great [to] solve more cases. But the man-hours and the difficulty that comes [in actually utilizing] that technology is the real difficulty.
So how did that growth impact your ability to handle the work needed to review it all?
Gerber: As the digital evidence grows, it’s just adapting to it. We got better at using specific softwares or tools that are out there, which allow you to try to allocate better time and resources towards it. But it’s really a matter of prioritizing that digital evidence over physical door-knocking and things because that’s these days where you find your greatest leads. Making sure you have the personnel that’s trained up to do so was the key.
So how did your staffing levels change?
Gerber: When I started 10-plus years ago, we had about the same amount of police officers we did when I retired 10 years later.
The city I worked in added [to] its population by 30% or more, and the crime only went up. So being able to keep up with staffing is near-impossible these days. So it’s just a matter of making sure your department is efficient because you really can’t keep up with the staffing needs currently as it sits. And it’s just a matter of making your smaller department more efficient so you can keep up with the crime.
So how did you manage the same amount or more work, but with less people?
Gerber: It’s just utilizing tools and specifically making sure each officer is trained up to be able to handle more workload, mostly in the investigations portion of things.
Patrol officers – you will always need a certain amount of officers to be able to handle the workload. But investigations, you can leverage tools to do the work of two, three, four officers through force multipliers like good software and good electronic tools to go through evidence.
In your time as an investigator, how did that amount of work impact your ability to select and work the cases?
Gerber: It’s just a matter of prioritization as you’re going through as an investigator, trying to decide “this case is going to take X amount of hours, and I’m going to need this many other detectives to work on it, but this is the priority piece of evidence that I’m going to go through.”
First, I’m going to allocate this resource or this tool to try to speed things up and find the piece of evidence that then I can bring to, say, a district attorney’s office and get more resources, or bring to the federal government for more resources through task forces and other funding.
In your experience, did you have to kind of pick and choose the cases that you proceeded on, or did others go unworked because simply you didn’t have the capacity?
Gerber: Yeah, sadly, these days, at least in my role, it was a lot of prioritization and knowing that you simply don’t have the resources or staffing to attempt to solve everything.
So it’s prioritizing human life and violent crime over other types of crime. But sadly, that means, you know, those property crimes tend to go to the wayside, and that’s the case kind of throughout the country these days.
Note: The above conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Look for Part 2 of this exclusive interview by the end of March 2025, where Rob discusses AI technology in investigations and how it can help force-multiply agency staff and bring better outcomes for those affected by crime, and how Veritone iDEMS can deliver on the mission of “AI for Good” and change the future of investigations for the better.
You can also join Rob and several other expert panelists on March 20 for a webinar that examines the uses of AI to accelerate investigations and increase case clearance rates. Find more information here.
