I have four body cameras and will need to get ready for cross.

As a public defender, piecing together questions and supporting material for a cross often means working from three different places at once. Bodycam in one tab, hearing transcripts in a folder, audio recordings somewhere in downloads, and Google Docs open in another browser.

You know a contradiction is in there. But it's always a race against time to find it.

Watching each bodycam start to finish, one at a time, means watching the same incident four times before you've found a single contradiction. And once you do find something, you still have to remember which officer, which angle, and which timestamp it was in, usually from a notebook, not the platform. And when you are dealing with 100 different cases at once, it is almost impossible to prep well for a cross without sacrificing your sleep and your time with the family.

How Reduct helps

Reduct has always done a good job with audio and video discovery. However, discovery doesn't involve only video; police reports as well as medical records, witness statements, and documents accumulate just as quickly as the footage does.

That's the gap that needed to be closed. And now that Reduct supports documents, prepping for cross is much smoother.

Here's the workflow that we recommend that works well.

Label statements and violations as you go

As you go through the report and go through each bodycam, label the moments that matter: officer statements, potential violations. Use one consistent label per officer, so everything on the record for "Officer Reyes" is tagged the same way whether it came from the report, the bodycam, or another file.

Pull it all together in the Labels tab

Once everything is labeled, go to the Labels tab. Every clip and excerpt tagged for a given officer shows up in one place. This is where contradictions surface. The report says one thing, the bodycam shows another, and you don't have to hunt across four files to see it.

Work with all four bodycams at once.

If there’s a common set of questions that I need to find from 4 different recordings, I can use the batch custom summary to try and find the moment I am looking for. The Reduct summary will answer each custom question and give a link to the source.

If the officers arrive at the same time, you can sync all of them together to see multiple officers' angles in a single view. If one officer's angle is blocked or out of frame, you may see it clearly from another officer’s angle. This alone cuts review time to a fraction of watching each video separately.

Build a composite reel with the best angle

When you know which camera captured the moment best, you don't have to stop there. You can easily build a composite reel that shows why it matters: "The officer's report points to Bodycam A. Here's Bodycam A, the view is blocked. Here's Bodycam B, same moment, clear contact." Showing the comparison side by side makes the cross more convincing than describing it.

You can also add sides with notes at the start or anywhere in the video. This is super helpful when you are trying to build a narrative.

Write down your questions with a link to the moment

You can draft your cross questions wherever you're used to working. For each question, attach a link straight to the clip, reel, or page it comes from. When you're in the room and need to pull up the exact moment, click through instead of digging for it.

If a question doesn't have enough behind it yet, go back to the discovery. You can batch summarize, ask a targeted question, re-read, or re-watch to find what you missed the first time.