When investigators are faced with mountains of digital evidence and shrinking timelines, the difference between solving a case and hitting a dead end often comes down to one thing: how quickly they can make sense of the data in front of them.
For the San Diego County District Attorney's Office, that challenge became a turning point, and the results have been nothing short of transformative.
The Challenge: Digital Evidence Without a Unified Workflow
The San Diego County DA's Office prosecutes all felony crimes in the county and misdemeanors outside the City of San Diego. Led by DA Summer Stephan, the office files more than 40,000 cases annually. At that scale, efficiency isn't just a goal. It's a necessity.
But like agencies across the country, investigators were struggling with a problem that has become all too common in modern law enforcement: digital evidence was everywhere, but the tools to analyze it were fragmented.
Cell phone extractions. Social media data. Tower dumps. Video surveillance. Financial records. Each source lived in a different system. Each required manual cross-referencing. Investigators were spending hours, sometimes days, stitching together datasets by hand, switching between software platforms, and hoping they hadn't missed a critical connection buried in the data.
In an era where criminals are increasingly organized and tech-savvy, that approach wasn't sustainable.
The Solution: Unified Digital Evidence Analysis
The San Diego DA's Office implemented NightHawk, a digital evidence fusion platform that ingests and unifies a wide range of data sources into a single investigative environment. Investigators can filter, search, and identify commonalities across datasets, comparing and linking suspects, activities, locations, and timelines all in one place.
They also adopted the LeadsOnline Toolbox, giving investigators instant access to phone number lookups, warrant templates, and other resources designed to remove guesswork and accelerate legal demands.
For Senior Investigator Josh Pittsley, a 20-year law enforcement veteran, the impact was immediate.
"What used to take me two days, I now do in 10 minutes. NightHawk lets me visualize and analyze the case the way I see fit and often surfaces key evidence I would've missed the traditional way."
From No Leads to 65 Closed Cases
Perhaps the most striking example of NightHawk in action came from a case that started with almost nothing.
Investigators were looking at seven residential burglaries. The suspects were masked. There were no fingerprints, no DNA, no names. Just surveillance footage that led nowhere on its own.
Having recently completed a NightHawk training course, Pittsley suggested a different approach: pull area and tower dump data from near the crime scenes and let the digital evidence tell the story.
What followed was a six-month investigation that closed 65 burglary cases spanning California and Nevada and culminated in a multi-agency, simultaneous takedown across nine locations in Southern California.
One dataset led to another. As investigators dug deeper, additional crimes surfaced, including vehicle theft, prostitution, and human trafficking. These were crimes that other agencies didn't even know were connected.
"I'm not just finding a needle in a haystack, I'm finding a needle in a needle stack," Pittsley said. "We were proactively solving cases other agencies didn't even know were connected."
Courtroom Visuals That Made Defendants Plead Guilty
Solving a case is only half the battle. Prosecutors need to present that evidence in a way that's clear, compelling, and defensible in court.
For one preliminary hearing, Pittsley built a 700-slide presentation using NightHawk's Storyboard feature, a built-in tool that allows investigators to create courtroom-ready visual narratives directly from their case data.
He only got through 200 slides before all eight defense attorneys advised their clients to plead guilty.
"It was so compelling they didn't want to go to trial. Even the defendants could see it. That's how clear the visualizations are."
That outcome saved the office from a two-month trial and freed staff to focus on the next case, a measurable return on investment that goes well beyond the courtroom.
Real-Time Intelligence in the Field
Pittsley's colleagues started calling him "tactical data," and for good reason.
He was running real-time surveillance analysis from his laptop in the car, pulling live insights from NightHawk while in the field. What once required returning to the office, logging into multiple systems, and manually compiling data could now happen in real time, from anywhere.
"It's not me, it's NightHawk. It lets me see and share the story clearly."
Building Bridges Between Agencies
The impact of NightHawk-driven investigations extended beyond the DA's Office itself. The success of the work created a new formal partnership with the San Diego Police Department, with investigators now collaborating earlier in cases across both agencies.
Pittsley has also worked with agencies coast to coast, spending hours helping teams in other states apply NightHawk to their own investigations.
"It works on any case," he said.
A Platform That Evolves With Its Users
What sets NightHawk apart, according to Pittsley, isn't just what it does today. It's how it grows.
"We didn't know we had a digital data analysis deficiency until we started using NightHawk," he said. He regularly engages with product engineers, participates in beta testing, and has seen his own feature suggestions make it into product updates.
"They actually listen. If I suggest a feature, there's a good chance it ends up in the next update. It's not a locked box like other software. It evolves with us."
Results at a Glance
Hear It Directly from Investigator Josh Pittsley
The Bottom Line
"There's nothing else that can ingest and visualize such a wide variety of data across time and distance. NightHawk helps us find what otherwise would be missed. There is no going back. We'd be lost without it." — Senior Investigator Josh Pittsley, San Diego County District Attorney's Office
If your agency is managing growing volumes of digital evidence and looking for a faster, more effective path from data to answers, we'd love to show you what's possible.
👉 [Request a Demo of NightHawk.]
LeadsOnline is a nationwide investigative intelligence platform helping law enforcement agencies find people, find property, and find patterns. Learn more at [LeadsOnline.com].