Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, everyone, welcome to the Real Evidence podcast, where we talk about the digital evidence landscape and how people, processes and technology come together towards restorative justice. My name is Myron.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: And I'm Ashley. And today we had a chance to talk to Heather Stewart. She is the deputy director of the Children's Justice center program for the state of Utah, and she recently helped successfully pioneer a statewide change to how forensic interviews managed across the state. So she's joined us today to speak about her experience, her lessons, and the advice that she has in doing a process like that in other states.
Thanks for joining us today, Heather.
[00:00:39] Speaker C: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Well, before we get into talking through what kind of workflow related things that we want to talk about today, we want to just hear a little bit about what your role is and how you got there.
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Sure. I am the deputy director of the Children's Justice center program.
That is our statewide chapter in Utah for Children's advocacy centers. In Utah, we call them cjcs instead of cacs, but I'm the deputy director here, and some of my main responsibilities include ensuring good service delivery among our cjcs and helping support their work with their multidisciplinary teams.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Heather, I'm really curious to hear more, too, about kind of the overall, like, approach that you're taking to things, but maybe if you could just tell us a little bit about what you've been working on recently and some of what that has entailed.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: Yeah, we have 25 cacs in our state, and we are regularly involved with all of them and many of the projects that they work on. And so a few years ago, we launched a statewide initiative to use Gardify as a means to store and share our forensic interviews with all of our partners in our state.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: And so I think that comes along with a lot of different things to consider when you're talking to so many different agencies, so many different types of people that are working with those forensic interviews. So what would you say was kind of the springboard or the catalyst for needing to establish that at the state level?
[00:02:24] Speaker C: One of the things that may be unique about our state is that we're really fortunate that we have state law that protects our forensic interviews that we conduct at our cacs, and it gives us a lot of direction and who we can share interviews with and how that should happen and different protections that we afford just to really protect those interviews as best we can and make sure they're only in the hands of people who legally have a right to have them. And so when we learned about Gardify a few years ago, we knew that that would be an opportunity for our state to provide even more protections of our interviews and get away from those old practices of lots of discs and hard drives, of interviews that were unprotected really floating around. And if someone who wasn't authorized to see it happened to come across that medium, then they could view those interviews if they wanted to.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: And you mentioned, like, with those state laws that were requiring certain levels of protection or were requiring certain levels of delivery, were there anything, anything specific in those maybe recent laws that had passed or that required that change, like from, like a physical delivery to more of a digital sort of storage process?
[00:03:47] Speaker C: No, the law doesn't dictate that to us, but because we administer the centers in our state, we just saw it as an opportunity for us to maybe help pay for Gardify for all of our centers, so that we'd also have a little bit more of a stake and a say so in how we rolled it out and how it was used, but to help centers actually pay that bill and carry that cost for them. But it just gave us, it really opened our eyes to new ways that we could make sure we were kind of evolving and getting away from bad practices and making sure these interviews were as safe as we could possibly make them.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: So, Heather, anytime you're going through sort of an initiative like this, especially when it's as wide spanning as something being across the state, I imagine there's impacts to a lot of different things, but there's people impacts, relational impacts. This is going to affect people. There's processes that are built into that, that need to change and evolve, the technology shifting and evolving. So just curious, you know, if you could give us a flyby of, like, what were some of the challenges, even at a 30,000 foot level, of things that you identified, and if you even want to maybe take those things through to how they were solved as well?
[00:04:59] Speaker C: Sure. I would say, too, one of the real benefits to us in Gardify, I mean, that that protection was really key for us, and that was the catalyst for everything. The cost and time savings to our staff and our partners. That was a secondary gain. It was a bonus for us, but not necessarily the primary reason that we wanted to go down this road. So I wanted to make sure that I mentioned that. But I think, as anybody who lives in the CAC world knows, change is one of the most difficult things for our staff and our team members. They get really wed to the way that we do things and to move them along and to. Even if it's an improvement or something that in the long run will be more helpful to them. It's really hard to convey that at the front end, because in their mind, things are going great, so why change it, you know? So. And I think I'm not a techie person, so for this to be my project, to kind of make sure I understood some of the techie and non techie things so that I could explain it to our CACs and to our MDT partners, you know, that was really important for me. I think the biggest hurdle was just having people feel comfortable that they no longer had a physical disc or dvd or flash drive of an interview, but how viewing that interview in the cloud still was that same kind of access, that physical. Getting them away from that physical piece of evidence has been one of the biggest challenges. So we've just walked through it, and we've helped them feel more comfortable about it.
They also wanted a lot of guarantees that none of the interviews would be lost once we used them with Gardify. And so we gave them as many reassurances as we could about that, knowing that probably nothing in technology is 100% foolproof, you know, but. And I think helping them understand that Gartify developed as a product or a solution in response particularly to what cacs do every day. It wasn't another offshoot company that was trying to get CACs as a customer like they actually were born in this work and have been so responsive to the field. So I think that that was sort of reassuring, because at some point, right, you just have to have people say, just believe me, and blindly follow and give us a little bit of faith here, and we'll make this work for you. I think one of the other, because we are very cautious about downloads. And so with our partners not having physical copies of things, then how do they document? Because there's no longer a disc and evidence that the police department are uploaded into their evidence system, or for dcfs, on our child protection. And so helping them document things within their reports, so that if an interview needed to be accessed by someone else in their agency or years down the road, they would know exactly how to get access to the interview. And then I think the other hurdle for us in particular is that since our cacs have been around for more than 30 years, since we're a facilitation agency, even though many of us are administrative, supervised directly by our prosecutor's offices, not all of us are. And we had always been in the habit of cacs will never be the custodian of interviews and the evidence. And given the way that Gardify works, obviously the CAC has to at least be the first custodian of things. And so working our MDTs and our CACs through what that looks like and why that's different and why it's okay that we're in that role now. That probably for us in particular was kind of one of the bigger things to work through.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: What made that so successful for you guys is the fact that you approached it from this is going to be a statewide workflow. We will do it the same from every center, and every prosecution office will come to expect that from place to place. I think sometimes it gets a little tricky when you don't have that kind of consistency. So I think that kind of, even though it was a challenge to establish that, it made it eventually easy to accept for some of those offices, for sure.
[00:09:37] Speaker C: Yeah, I think as much as you can standardize it, but give them some customization options too, right? At the same time, and we're still working through that, some of the things that we were really convinced would be the way to go in the beginning. We've sort of pulled back on a little bit or have added some more flexibility.
And I think, honestly, it does take some of the pressure off of the individual cacs because they can point to me or my office kind of as the bad guy or the person who's making the change happen, you know, and take the heat off of themselves a little bit. And I'm sure that you can relate on the gardify end, there's probably like a top 25 issues that recur constantly for MDTs and CACs. So to be able to point some of their partners to me or in some cases to you to help resolve that, or with that, repetition helps take the burden off of the CACs who are already so busy with their day to day. So hopefully it's been a win win.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Can you elaborate too? Just like how long is this journey been? How long have you been on this journey? Maybe. What were some of the key metrics, key things, milestones that you're like, we want to get to this point. I can imagine things like everybody's using, everybody's onboarded those types of things, but also there's probably a lot of nuanced things and detailed things that go into to your point, here's sort of what the standard is, and then here's where you get the flexibility. So maybe if you could just start by telling us a little bit about how long has this journey been? Where are you guys at in this journey currently? Like you said, there's still stuff left to do, and then, like, what have been the milestones that you guys have hit along the way?
[00:11:20] Speaker C: Any forensic interviewers on the call will be able to relate, or on that listen, will be able to relate. My ability to tell you how long or when is really skewed. Ashley can probably answer that question better than I can. I think we're in our second full year of implementation statewide, but one of the key things that we did early on is we had a few of our centers pilot using Gardify first so that they could vouch for the effectiveness or the ease of use, you know, and kind of work through some of the initial hiccups with their teams so that when we presented it, what, we wanted them to test it to make sure it was a good product and something that that would work for us. And then we took their feedback and they could tell other directors of other CACs how it worked and what they worked through, which, again, you know, we tested it a little bit so they weren't just walking into something that. That was brand, brand new. So I think that that was important for us. The other piece for us that was important is that, you know, it's a. It's a reasonable price tag, but it's a lot of money when you're paying for it for your entire state. And it wasn't a pile of money that we already had set aside, so we had to figure out how we were going to fund it. Again, I'm. I'm housed through the attorney general's office here, and we're lucky that our attorney general tech speaks to him. That's kind of his background. So it was really easy to get him to, you know, support the project, which then allowed us to be able to go to our state legislature and ask them for the funding for this product and why it would protect interviews and the privacy of children and be aligned with what our state law is around that. So I think those were all really big pieces.
The metrics, really, for us was, could we substantially decrease the number of hard copies of interviews floating around that really anybody could access? Because we've had horror stories in our state, I'm sure, just like other states have, where back in the day, we accidentally sent a disc for an out of state law enforcement jurisdiction, for which we did a courtesy interview. We sent it to the suspect's home by accident instead of to the police department because it was a different state we didn't recognize addresses. It was an honest mistake. We literally have had Walmart neighbors call local centers to say that a dvd was found in a store or in, you know, because it just fell out of someone's purse or their binder that they were using for the case. I mean, very innocent, but very harmful.
So those were the horror stories we were kind of working from that convinced us that this digital way of sharing was going to be much better and helped us convince our partners and to get the funding, you know, and all of those things. We also preemptively had individual meetings with CACs, with teams, with prosecutors offices, with dcfs, with all the attorneys involved with these cases, including the defense bar and our courts, to ask, if we go down this road, does that still work for your purposes? And, you know, how can we? So we did a lot of vetting upfront, too, to hopefully answer some of those questions that we anticipated would come up once implementation occurred. And along with those meetings, we had Gardify attend to answer some of the more techie things that I couldn't answer and to give some real basic demonstrations of what was, what they could expect.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I think in the conversations I've had with your various partners, it's been very apparent that, like, the very direct show and tell of how that workflow is going to be executed has helped immensely.
But do you see or hear any pushback or feedback to this day that you still are having challenges with or things like that from people outside of the CJCs?
[00:15:39] Speaker C: I think most of the time it's things that might cause frustration just because they don't understand how it works. So it's just, it's really a reeducation piece or something that they forgot. Because even though we were really intentional and put a lot of time and effort into the onboarding, a lot of these things don't make sense until they're actually using it and doing it. And so they just need a lot of reminders. You know, there are a lot of features. In the beginning, we were kind of baby users and still are a little bit. I still don't think that we're, all of us are using all of the features as effectively as we could. And that's sort of our goal for this year, is to make, you know, they've gotten through the basics now. And so now we want to do a deeper dive and have people use, you know, the mobile app a little bit more. And some of those things, you know, early on, I will say, you know, we would get feedback that the transcription, you know, wasn't as accurate as they expected it to be. And I know that that is something that you've always been working on upgrading and making better. And I think one of the things that has really paid off is having you at customer support that they can go to directly in lots of different ways to re explain or walk them through it. That's taken a lot of pressure off of me, and it also gives them the exact support that they need.
And then, you know, we've tried to incorporate you from last year moving forward at our statewide conference, so people can just come and ask you questions and, you know, work through whatever it is.
Nothing has come up that we couldn't work through. For sure.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: It's worth acknowledging that. Just, it's really cool as somebody who wasn't in the throes with you too, just to see how, you know, you guys are even talking about the complimentary sort of collaboration that went into this. So just, you know, kudos to you guys. I know there's a lot of other people involved, but it's not easy to do something on a state level. So this is a really interesting journey that I think part of the reason, Heather, that we were like, it'd be great for you to come on the podcast to talk about this is there's a lot of other people who are probably in the same seat, probably starting a journey or mid journey also really trying to work through that as well. So that does make me a little curious of, you know, if you're thinking about the person who's either in a seat similar to yours, trying to do a very similar thing at the state level, what advice would you give someone either starting or in the journey?
[00:18:12] Speaker C: I would say do your homework, you know, try to understand it as much as you can. Use all of the great resources that Garda PI already has. They have, you know, a lot of one pagers demos, like involve them in onboarding, like involve them every step of the way. Because chances are whatever issue you have come up for your team, Gardify has already worked through with another team or a state. Because again, in my experience, anyway, it tends to be the same kinds of things.
I think be flexible, understand that they're going to need a lot of repetition because it's new and it's big and it is so different. I shared with Ashley early on because I've been doing this work for almost 30 years now. When I started at my CAc, we recorded interviews on a VHS tape and two audio tapes for like, backup. And sometimes we still had a handheld in there, and so some of us old schoolers that have been doing this for a long time, like this is really like cutting edge new stuff. So just show yourself some grace, know you can get through it. Other states have done it, so, you know, it's quite possible. You just have to be patient. And the great, really, the blessing for me in all of this has been that I'm not going it alone. The other thing that I really wanted to mention that I think is really important are the customer satisfaction surveys that users, every six months, I think, or so, will get a pop up to give feedback to Gartify about pros, cons, any feedback that they want to share. I can tell you that I've been in meetings with Gartify where they're absolutely inclusive and responsive to hearing that feedback and making some changes if that needs to happen. But for me, at the statewide level, I love it when my garda fi people give me those comments, good and bad, that I can share back out with my cacs, with my teams sometimes. And we just had one. A prosecutor talked about a frustration that the CAC didn't know about because they didn't talk directly to the CAC about it. But by Gardify bringing it to me, I could then work through problem solving with the CAC. And now somebody who was frustrated or a little grumpy about something is feeling really great about things. And so all of that kind of constant feedback coming and going, I think has been really, really, really helpful.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: I think that's a really good point, too, about just being so communicative with your MDT. I think we hear sometimes where there isn't necessarily that conversation happening from agency to agency. And so we try to approach that from a place of being, that conduit between each of those offices. And I think you at the state level are also providing that because a lot of agencies and a lot of centers don't have that level of connection. I guess you could say you don't have somebody pulling them all together like that. So I think that's been very instrumental in your process as well.
[00:21:21] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a blessing and a curse, right? Because you share the numbers with me every month, and I'm congratulating my centers. I mean, I send out kudos, like, we've had a 99% decrease in downloads or physical copies floating around. But then if I see downloads creep up a little bit, I'm checking in with people and they're like, oh, gosh, here she is again. And I'm like, I just want to make sure we're kind of staying within the guardrails that we created for ourselves that we did agree on. And I think I being a statewide kind of initiative, we have helped a lot with the viewer agreements and the workflows and certain rules that we all agree to that makes it easier for our whole state and all of our MDT partners, for sure.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Well, Heather, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on the podcast to tell us a little bit about your journey and some of the knowledge and wisdom that you've gained throughout that. We really appreciate it. We really appreciate the partnership as well. I mean, it means a lot. I know I'm speaking, and I know Ashley and you guys really worked together on us a long time, but I think just hearing this story alone also shows the real human element of working together to do something that's bigger. So thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
[00:22:34] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Now, I don't know how we ever lived without Gardify before, and I can assure you we will not live without it moving forward. So thank you.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Absolutely. Thank you so much for listening today. It was a pleasure to have Heather on. I hope that you take things away and that you're able to apply those things. If you would please consider rating this podcast. You can find this on any platform that you listen to podcasts or on YouTube. You can also go there. Please consider subscribing if you're on YouTube. You can also visit www.gartify.com backslash Realevidence podcast. We really appreciate you listening, and until next time, we'll see you.
