Some of the most critical information in crime scenes must
be documented in diagrams rather than in text. The Crime Zone software package
from The CAD Zone allows police officers to enter dimensions of rooms, place
images of common objects and perform other data entry operations that recreate a
crime scene.
“We are told almost everyday that
officers did not have to go to court after the defendant saw how detailed the
description was,” says Janice White, co-founder of The CAD Zone. “They plead
guilty.” A precise description can, for example, prove that the trajectory of
a bullet contradicted a defendant’s claim about how an incident occurred.
The Crime Zone can be integrated with
large-scale records management systems so that users do not have to exit from
the primary application to draw the crime scene. Sometimes investigating
officers draw hand sketches at the scene, and then transfer them to The Crime
Zone, while other times they bring a laptop to the scene. The product’s
ease-of-use is an asset to police officers, who have little time for training on
software products. The CAD Zone is planning options that allow officers to enter
data into Windows CE handheld computers, although that software will not have
the full functionality of the computer product. The company also provides other
drawing products such as The Crash Zone, which documents vehicle accidents.
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