He said, she said

Whether in day-to-day crime fighting or the global war on terrorism, a botched interrogation can halt the wheels of justice. TiTi McNeill and her company, TranTech developed a solution.

By Les Shaver
SmartCEO magazine, March 2007 (link to pdf of issue. Pg 30)

Jeff Deskovic, then 16 years old, was devastated when his 15-year-old classmate was found raped, beaten, and strangled after she went out to take pictures for a photography class. Deskovic showed up late for school the day after the murder, November 15, 1989, and visited her wake three times. Police didn't look at Deskovic as a distraught friend though. They saw him as a suspect in the murder.

They spoke with Deskovic eight times in December 1989 and January 1990, according to Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic in New York. The police asked Deskovic to do a polygraph examination and he agreed in late January 1990. With no lawyer or parent present, Deskovic was interrogated and interviewed throughout the day. He was given coffee, but no food. Eventually, Deskovic broke down and confessed, even though his DNA was not a match. In January 1991, a jury convicted Deskovic of first-degree rape and second-degree murder.

But there was a problem: Deskovic wasn't the murderer. He lost 15 years of his life. Finally, on November 2, 2006, after the Innocence Project took the case, Deskovic's indictment was dismissed after post-conviction DNA testing pointed to his innocence. The testing identified another suspect who was involved in a separate 1989 murder and rape.

If Deskovic's interrogation had been videotaped there's a good chance he would have been treated differently and he might not have had to spend 15 years in prison. That's why rights groups such as Innocence Project have called on states across the country to enact laws requiring taped interviews. Ten states including the District of Colombia, responded. Alexandria, VA company Tran Tech and its CEO, TiTi McNeill did, too.

The leader

When you first see TiTi McNeill words like tenacious, dogged and driven may not be the things that come to mind. McNeill's petite frame and friendly, outgoing personality obscure a hard-nose business leader and risk taker beneath the surface.

What McNeill accomplished since she arrived in the United States from her native Vietnam in 1975 is remarkable. She worked her way from the ground up, starting with the most menial office tasks to eventually leading a company with revenues of almost $40 million a year.

McNeill isn't resting on her laurels, though. TranTech (McNeill's maiden name is Tran) is building on its criminal justice solutions, like the video storage system for the Department of Defense, and is marketing three retooled versions of the original product, called MEDIA-Solv, for police forces around the country. However, getting her product incorporated into police departments around the country won't be easy.

When Saigon fell in 1975 to the North Vietnamese forces, many South Vietnamese fled. McNeill and her sister were among them. "I left Saigon way past midnight on the last bloody day: April 30, 1975," McNeill says in an interview with SmartCEO. It was a better life here in the United States that interested her.

McNeill and her sister arrived without money or relatives. But she had training as a key punch operator in Vietnam, which became the springboard to her career.

"I had to get a job fast", McNeill said. "I got a job as a key punch operator. That was big in the 70's and 80's.

McNeill jumped in headfirst, working past midnight to get overtime and earn time and a half pay. That helped her stretch her $3.25 an hour as far as possible. "For an immigrant that was a lot." McNeill says. "I didn't have much to spend it on. I didn't eat much or shop much or do anything like that."

McNeill left the job to take a position with Value Systems in Fairfax. "I worked hard to prove I was a worthy person," McNeill says. "I would come in on the day shift, evening shift, night shift, and on weekends. I never called in sick. I put in the hours like you wouldn't believe, but I learned everything on that field and I loved that field."

Eventually McNeill became a programmer. She learned a lot about databases, software and applications. She became so good that she wanted to go out on her own. That's when TranTech was born in 1990. "I felt really, really good about what I was doing," McNeill says. I" knew my business and applications. When I went in to talk to a certain client, I knew what I could do for them. I offered my guarantee that what I sold to them would work for them."

TranTech now provides software engineering, system engineering, IT security and network engineering for clients like the Government Services Administration, Navy, Department of Transportation, and Department of Commerce.

"Everything that I have in this company is through really hard work," McNeill says. "Nothing came easy to me. Nobody gave me anything. I worked really hard and was creative."

Video vanguard

TranTech's creativity bore fruit in 2003 when it won its first large multi-million dollar project to digitize and store analog video for the Department of Defense. The project allowed multiple sources of evidence to be stored, searched, retrieved, and viewed all in a single system. Early on, McNeill knew the product had market potential beyond the federal government.

"It wasn't huge in dollars, but it was a really innovative product," McNeill says. "They liked it a lot. When that project was done, we continued with research and development and broke into bits and pieces and developed the offspring. It took three or four years to get them all done."

Now TranTech has three different systems offered to small, medium and large law enforcement agencies. The TranTech system takes video and audio from a variety of sources, including cameras in cars, interrogation rooms, general surveillance cameras around a city, gunshot detection systems, and just about any other spot law enforcement collects audio or video.

"For the interview rooms, we sell a complete system that starts with the camera and goes through to the back office functionality of managing the video asset," said Allan Bellacicco, senior vice president for TranTech.

Bellacicco says MEDIASolv allows police departments to protect their inventory and expand its use to other applications. The system also allows law enforcement to convert their analog recordings to digital and put them on either a DVD or a hard drive. This conversion creates new challenges.

"The ones and zeros [in digital files] can be altered," said Albert Arena, project manager for The Research Center Directorate for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "All you can do with analog is crop pieces out and it's easy to know when that happens. It's more difficult [to know something has been altered] with digital renditions of movies."

Bellacicco says the MEDIASolv product family protects this chain of custody.

"It is tamper resistant," Bellacicco said. "You can show what was originally recorded and if it has been altered since that point. In addition, we do things like put a watermark on it so that we can guarantee it came from our system. It can provide that security so that no one gets into it. We also provide a chain of custody so that we can show where that has been, who has viewed it and what has happened to the file since it was created."

Once the pictures, audio, video, and graphics are gathered and stored, the MEDIASolv system stores it all into a database. It also has a search function that allows police personnel or a district attorney to recover evidence very quickly. In fact, the system allows police to collect evidence from the time of the crime throughout the legal process.

"You could have general surveillance," Bellacicco says. "They [the police] hear a gunshot and triangulate and record what they could as a result of the gunshot. They can dispatch police cars that have in-car video. They make an arrest and take the suspect back to headquarters, interview him and record that. The whole time they are collecting all of these pieces of video that are being integrated into a case file. As the investigation continues to unfold, they may dispatch someone to the crime scene to take additional footage, video and still photos. When it's done, they have collected a variety of undisputable pieces of evidence."

In the long run, everyone seems to benefit from this tamper-resistant evidence trail. Both the suspects and police will have a video recording of what happened and their rights will be protected. And, the district attorney has solid evidence to present to a jury.

"You are no longer in the 'he said, she said' mode," Bellacicco said. "You can provide a variety of footage in the courtroom and prove that it's unaltered, original footage that the DA can use as evidence to close more cases."

Spreading the News

TranTech says MEDIASolv helps cops catalog and maintain evidence. It can help them find evidence quickly, which reduces administrative duties. It can protect them against civilian abuse charges. Perhaps most importantly, its tamper resistance and detailed chain of custody could improve conviction rates as more evidence is rendered admissible in court.

So far, the Washington Metropolitan Police Department (2004) and the Chicago Police Department (2005) have signed up. Neither of the two police departments would return calls about the product.

"During those two years, we did not want to move too fast into the widely exciting but unknown market," McNeill says. "We had to do market research and study to find out the target markets, how the potential customer might prefer to use our products, we had to check out the potential competitors, what pricing we should use and how we should market our products to the target markets."

With more than 10 states adopting legislation to require video interrogations, McNeill expects more to come aboard. But TranTech may have to educate some police forces first. "They're just not aware of all of the range of technologies we can offer yet," McNeill says. They are very smart, but some are not super high-tech people. They might know what the system can do, but they're not sure until we've proven ourselves. I don't consider that a problem yet. We just need to convince them why they need it."

Many departments associate video storage with analog tapes, Arena said. Analog storage required them to find space and spend money. So, TranTech will have to show how storing its digital product differs from storing analog tapes.

"In the past, with VHS in-car cameras, you had to have capacity to capture large amounts of data on VHS and then you had to find a place to store them," Arena says. "You needed a very large storage facility and you needed a librarian to catalog, store, file, and retrieve them. The physical and manual work you had to do with that old format (analog) is beyond the budget of a large number of departments, considering that most of the departments out there have fewer than 14 people on their staff."

Then there's the issue of mistrusting technology in general. Some police departments have remained resistant to video technology.

"There's still been some resistance from some departments to have in-car cameras, whether it's a union or the officers themselves are able to say we don't want it because we think it's a disservice to monitor everything we do," notes Arena.

Even when police departments do jump in and buy technology, they don't want to buy something that will soon be out of date.

"It's a question of if they can afford it, if they're qualified to make a decisions to buy the best technology or will they get caught their pants down," says Arena. "They don't want to buy something and find out one year later that it's obsolete."

TranTech offers a product that can help police departments store video interviews ("store video interviews" is replaced with "products") without a librarian and can add other technology. It's up to McNeill and her team to sell the product. She's confident she'll get past budgetary concerns.

"Sometimes [the police departments] don't have money yet," McNeill says. "Once they're convinced it's right thing to do, they'll come up with money. Once we convinced Washington and Chicago, they came up with money fast. Our products really fit into the needs of the time." TranTech recently hired a public relations firm and started a marketing campaign, including advertising in police magazines and on police web sites. So far, it has generated word-of-mouth advertising among law enforcement agencies.

"We've already been in contact with many police departments to let them know about it," McNeill says "There are a total of 19,000 police departments. Why can’t we get all of them? We want all of them."

About TranTech

TranTech, Inc., was founded in December 1989 in Alexandria, Virginia as a woman-owned Information Technology Solutions and Services provider. TranTech’s core services include Business Support Services; Information Engineering, Architecture and Management; Software and Systems Engineering; IT Services and Support; and Voice and Data Networking. Using these services as a foundation, we have created solutions in Digital Asset Management; Oracle Systems and Applications; and Utility (On Demand) Computing.

TranTech’s Digital Asset Management solution MediaSolv™ offers integrated Digital Video Evidence Ingestion and Case Management tools that allow multiple sources of video evidence to be digitized, stored, searched, retrieved and viewed all critical video information in a single system.  MediaSolv integrates evidence from multiple sources including: digital audio (911 calls), in-car video, video interview rooms, digital images (mug shots, finger prints, and forensics), documents, layered voice analysis, language translation, full text search and workflow.

We provide outstanding expertise, technical solutions and mission-critical support to a Federal Government client-base that includes numerous DoD and Civilian agencies, as well as state and local governments and commercial clients. TranTech is rated SEI CMM Level 2 and has a facility clearance. For more information on TranTech, see our Company History.

 

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