YOUNGSTOWN — The Mahoning County commissioners approved a $336,720 agreement between the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office and Axon Evidence Justice Services on Thursday that gives the prosecutor’s office access for the next five years to Axon’s digital evidence management services.

The prosecutor’s office already had been using some of the services on a trial basis since 2022, but additional features will be added as training is completed, including a feature the prosecutor’s office is excited about — transcribing and digitizing jail calls and translating them into English where necessary and even translating slang terms.

Mary Rousher, lead criminal secretary at the prosecutor’s office, said the service uses artificial intelligence to “learn” new terms as they come up.

Because the calls are digitized, law enforcement and prosecutorial personnel also can search the files for specific terms. Linette Stratford, chief assistant prosecutor, said the company is offering services that reduce the amount of time paralegals at the prosecutor’s office have to spend processing mountains of evidence in criminal cases.

“They have the ability not only to capture body cam footage, but so much more,” Stratford said.

Another module provides redaction services for public records requests and redactions for documents or images that are used as exhibits at trials.

And in cases where security footage is obtained from a property owner, for instance, the service will find the software needed to view the videos since there can be many formats used by different surveillance systems, Rousher said. The service is the management and storage system for massive amounts of data, such as when the data is collected from cellphones in a criminal case.

When a law enforcement agency provides body camera videos, they have to be redacted to remove images of children, for instance. The new service does that type of redaction automatically.

“There are so many things you have to fade out, but this will automatically pull certain things out,” Stratford said.

Stratford said in a criminal case, the prosecutor’s office has to provide the evidence they have to the defense.

“It can be extensive because we can have body cams, you will have huge phone dumps, potentially a Ring cam, so all of that digital evidence is very time-consuming to download onto terabyte drives to produce it.

“This will allow the defense attorneys to click on a link and see it,” Stratford said.

The various police departments in the county will be able to download their body camera videos into the new system no matter what type of body camera system they use, as well as interviews conducted by officers.

All of the evidence will be linked to the case in the prosecutor’s Matrix case management system, which makes case evidence available to the parties in the case, such as the defense attorneys and prosecutors. It also can track who has accessed the information. It will be much faster than earlier methods, Stratford said.

Now it won’t matter what type of technology the defense attorney has, he or she will be able to access and see videos and other evidence, she said. The service provides unlimited cloud storage. Right now, the cost for police departments to store body camera video is high, they noted. The system will expedite the completion of cases and store and manage all of the information, Stratford said.

The new features will be available right away, but Axon training for support staff and attorneys at the prosecutor’s office will have to take place first and also training for police department staff. The Youngstown Police Department already is using Axon digital management services and Axon body cameras, so its personnel already are trained.

Stratford said the new system also makes it easier to share information with law enforcement around the country when a crime happens in Mahoning County that might involve other areas of the country, such as a serial killer or theft ring.

The 2020 killing of Rowan Sweeney and the prosecutions of three men on murder charges in the case revealed the amount of digital evidence that can be generated in a criminal case.

In February 2023, Mahoning County prosecutors provided an 11-page document listing the contents of three one-terabyte storage devices full of evidence provided to defense attorney Walter Madison, shortly after he started on the case. The list described documents, videos, interviews, phone records, photo lineups, subpoenas, detective notes, evidence reports and search warrants prosecutors had compiled and provided to the defense.