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.

“Events unfold rapidly, so obtaining critical information as early as possible is essential to resolving cases and improving overall solvability outcome,” said Capt. Nelson Carrington, who leads the department’s Investigations Division.

‘The sooner you talk to them, the better’

Much of an investigation can rest on what witnesses remember and whether they are willing to talk, and both fade with time. A 2022 review of cold-case investigations found that the quality of witness accounts is time-critical: as the delay grows, so does the likelihood of forgetting, and potentially valuable leads from witnesses become harder to recover.

“When you have a witness who is pertinent to the case, it’s very important to get as much information from them as you can at that point in time,” said Emon. “To track down witnesses later is very difficult, so to have that information as quickly as I did — to catch the witness while they’re cooperative, and before they leave for work or decide not to answer their door for the police anymore — is helpful. The sooner you talk to them, the better. In this case, Peregrine gave me that opportunity with that information fairly quickly.”

Without the mobile app, the same work would have waited. “Without Peregrine, the information probably would not have gotten run for another couple days since the call happened at the end of the week,” Emon said. “I probably would have found what I needed at some point, but I would have had to loop through different databases to get there, and it would have taken me a day or two.”

Unified records

Peregrine Technologies turns the fragmented information an organization already holds into a single, usable picture, the kind that helps its people decide and coordinate faster. The company does not collect, create, or sell data. The records that identified the suspect in San Bernardino already belonged to the department: the prior-arrest report, the body-worn camera footage, and the department’s own databases. What Peregrine did was bring them into a single, permission-aware view a detective could reach from the field, and connect them to the case in front of him.

An investigator’s information is usually spread across separate systems, each with its own login and search box, most of them reachable only from a desk. By mapping an organization’s own records to its cases and to the roles of the people using them, the Peregrine platform is designed to surface the relevant connection at the moment it is useful. The platform draws only on the information a given user is already authorized to see, every result traces back to the underlying record, and the decision about what to do with it stays with the investigator.

The difference in this case was where that could happen. Because the platform extends to mobile with a dedicated app, Emon did not have to return to his desk to chase the lead. He ran it from the parking lot, while the witness was still there. “I was impressed with the Peregrine mobile app when it pulled up the information I needed right away,” he said. “I usually sit at my desk and run information through my databases from there. I didn’t realize you could even get BWC through Peregrine. So when it all popped up and I was able to play it on the spot, I was excited about that. And then the fact that it gave me what I needed pretty much right away was even more impressive.”

A force multiplier for a stretched department

Departments across the country are working through the same recruitment and retention pressures, and San Bernardino frames its technology investments partly as a way to do more with the people it has. “We are continuing to leverage technology as a force multiplier, and Peregrine allows our personnel to process information far more efficiently than traditional manual methods,” Carrington said. “In this case, Peregrine helped investigators identify key leads and solve a homicide in less than an hour from the time they arrived on scene, highlighting the powerful role this technology plays in improving investigative effectiveness.”

Read more recent Peregrine news here: https://www.finsmes.com/2026/06/peregrine-technologies-raises-250m-in-series-d-funding-at-6-8-billion-valuation.html