Case Study: Harris County Sheriff's Office achieves 50%+ faster audio reproduction and strengthened QA with NICE Systems

Largest U.S. Sheriff’s Office Cuts Audio Reproduction Turnaround Time by over 50%, Bolsters QA to Improve Service

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) — the largest sheriff’s office in Texas and third largest in the U.S., with about 4,600 employees — struggled to fulfill roughly 12,000 annual audio records requests with only six custodians. Their legacy workflow of burning CDs and printing documentation caused frequent backlogs and three- to six-week turnaround times, plus about $2,700/month in overhead, and they lacked a systematic, modern QA program for 9-1-1 and radio recordings.

By deploying the NICE Inform suite (Recording, Organizer, Reconstruction and Evaluator) HCSO moved to paperless delivery, easy redaction, reuse of prior reproductions, and secure .wav file sharing. Turnaround dropped to 10–15 days (over a 50% improvement), backlog is now within 30 days, monthly overhead is virtually eliminated, and NICE Inform Evaluator established automated, rules-based QA with electronic evaluations and better feedback for telecommunicators.

Harris County Sheriff’s Office

Kathi Yost

Director of Communications