Three Years to Justice: Why Police Digitalization Can't Wait
This week, after an excellent CEPOL webinar with a colleague and expert from Europol‘s Innovation Lab, I experienced two situations that once again showed how urgently police processes need better digitalization and automation. I won’t go too deep into the details, but here’s what I can share.
It is alarming to see that a standard forensic data extraction can take around 20 months before the material is even available to an investigator. Certain cases can be prioritized and processed in a matter of days, but not everything can receive that level of priority. For most cases, the waiting time remains unchanged. And in cases involving CSAM, the next stage of analysis is often handled by a separate unit, which may require up to 15 additional months. In the worst scenario, this leads to 35 months before digital evidence has been fully evaluated. I can’t provide precise statistics, but this is the reality colleagues describe on a regular basis.
Large amounts of data naturally take time to process. However, the fact that the queue itself is so long shows how urgently we need to rethink and modernize our workflows. When final casework can only begin after nearly three years, it becomes clear why police and judicial systems struggle to respond quickly.
The second situation involved a colleague who asked whether we have a tool that can visually present all relevant information about a suspect, including connections to other individuals. In his case, the offender committed more than 100 crimes within half a year, and he wanted to identify patterns and links between the incidents. Our current system, however, only gives us a long list that cannot be sorted or filtered, and it offers no visual representation at all. His workaround is to print everything out and connect related elements on a pinboard with strings. It works, but it’s incredibly time-consuming. Some people would describe it as “good old police work”.
These are only two examples, but they clearly show why it is so important to automate workflows, connect systems, and simplify data queries. Data protection remains essential, of course. Yet in an era where more and more crimes take place in the digital space, and where AI makes it easier for offenders to operate, we need to seriously reconsider how investigations should work when terabytes of data have to be analyzed.
What are your thoughts on this topic?