Case Study

How a Utah Detective Unit Turned Weeks of Evidence Review Into 20 Minutes

A working detective unit put ShieldView through its paces on real cases — stolen firearms, fraud series, harassment investigations — and what command staff should take from it.

Agency
City Police Dept. (name withheld)
Location
Utah
Units Using ShieldView
Investigations
Deployment
June 2026

The Challenge

Like most agencies, this department's detectives face a digital evidence problem that grows every year: warrant returns, phone extractions, message threads, and documents pile up faster than any investigator can read them. A single case can come back with 2,000 pages of Instagram warrant returns or carry 150+ items of digital evidence — and somewhere inside that volume is the one detail that moves the case forward.

Reading it all by hand means weeks of screen time spent scrolling instead of solving.

How the Unit Uses ShieldView

Finding the lead buried in message data

In a stolen-handgun investigation, a detective faced 2,000 pages of Instagram warrant returns to sort through by hand. With ShieldView it took him 20 minutes — and Agent Rhodes surfaced messages pointing to who likely had the gun. In his words: “That was amazing, without that it would have taken me weeks.”

Questioning an entire case file at once

Detectives upload full evidence sets — extractions, warrant returns, documents, video interviews — and ask questions across all of it in plain English. On one case, more than 150 evidence items were loaded and analyzed in ShieldView.

Real prompt from casework“any other mentions of a gun or any known street slang for a handgun that might give any other clues of who has it?”

Warrants and reports that sound like the investigator

Detectives draft search warrants — items to be seized and probable cause statements — in their unit's paragraph style, condense “fluffy” PC statements, and turn bodycam and video interviews into reports.

Real prompt from casework“Can you condense the probable cause statement for the Instagram accounts? Its got a lot of fluff.”

Warrants that hold up to legal scrutiny

When a reviewing attorney flagged a cell-phone warrant as potentially over-broad, a detective used ShieldView to add limiting parameters and a tighter 45-day timeline — keeping the warrant inside a scope courts will uphold.

“Yeah I just tried Agent Rhodes and it was able to find messages giving a clue of who has the stolen handgun or at least a next lead for me to follow up on. Which is amazing... that would have taken me forever to go through.”
Detective · Investigations Unit
“Your tool is selling itself. The team is constantly talking about it.”
Deputy Chief

2,000 Pages of Warrant Returns: Manual vs. ShieldView

Manual review by hand — “Weeks” (detective's estimate)
Same review with ShieldView — 20 minutes

Results & Outcomes

20 min
To work through 2,000 pages of warrant returns
150+
Evidence items analyzed on a single case
8 cases
Worked in ShieldView in the first 30 days
Unit-wide
Detectives across the unit have logins and use it

30 Days of Real Casework

Since deployment in June, detectives across the unit have had logins and put ShieldView to work on their cases — running it across eight active investigations: a stolen firearm, multiple fraud cases, a fraud-and-forgery series, and a harassment case involving a firearm threat.

Across those cases it handled evidence analysis, search warrant drafting, interview preparation, victim summaries, timeline building, charging references to Utah Code, and report writing — detailed answers on demand, from work that would otherwise consume days of an investigator's week.

Real Prompts From the Unit's Casework

Fraud — Interview Prep“Did I miss anything during my interview of the suspect? Should I have asked or touched more on anything else?”
Fraud & Forgery — Case Management“Give me a summary of my investigation up to this point and what possible next steps for my investigation”
Fraud — Building the To-Do List“1. Give me a list of everthing that needs to be independently verified. 2. Give me a list of who to get witness statements from. 3. What records need to preserved and requested. 4. Give me a new list of questions to ask and records to ask for when I meet with the suspect and her lawyer”
Harassment — Warrant Scope“With a firearm and threat to kill being involved, do you think my time line should be a little more broad?”

A Partner, Not Just a Vendor

Throughout the deployment, the unit's detectives worked directly with ShieldView's founders — questions answered same-day, issues turned around in days, and investigator feature requests (like saved per-user report preferences) moved straight onto the product roadmap. ShieldView is built in Utah, alongside the agencies that use it.

What This Means for Your Agency

Individuals and agencies referenced in this case study may be pilot users or fully contracted customers of ShieldView.

See What ShieldView Can Do on Your Cases

Weeks of evidence review, compressed into minutes — on real cases, at a real agency. See it on yours.

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