In May 2025, officers with the San Bernardino Police Department were called to the parking lot of an apartment complex, where someone had found a body. Within the next hour, and without leaving the scene, detectives had established that the death was a homicide, identified a suspect, and confirmed that identification with a witness.
Investigations like that usually take days. This one moved at the speed it did because a detective could pull the department’s own records together from the scene, on a platform built by Peregrine Technologies.
The first hour
When the San Bernardino homicide unit reached the apartment complex, detectives started with what was in front of them. They reviewed the complex’s own security video and picked out a person who might be involved. Then they went to the victim’s apartment, where they found a prescription pill bottle carrying the name of someone who did not live there.
That name was the break. Detective Christopher Emon entered it into the Peregrine mobile app, which searched the department’s records and returned a person with the same name who had been arrested earlier that year. That record included body-worn camera (BWC) footage from the earlier arrest. Emon compared the footage with the security video from the complex and saw the same face in both. He reached a witness at the scene, ran a photo lineup, and confirmed the suspect’s identity. Officers made an arrest…