Family and Friends Forum

Hi, for us the phone was extracted and reviewed within 2 weeks, the laptop took 3 months and a lot of chasing (The Christmas period fell within this so could of slowed things down)

xx

It took 9 months to proceed the devices in our case. But he had refused to give pass words and had hidden files. The back log we were told was 12 months though it's grown since 2 years ago.

Hi. Arrest was 24 months ago, case went to CPS ten weeks ago. Still not heard anything. I think it took about 18 months for the devices to be checked but the actual process would take a matter of days depending on the device and and how much they have to scan through. It's impossible to say really. X

This is an interesting question as the police can check some devices immediately. My sons work phone was checked during his arrest and returned straight back to him. His laptop was returned a month or so later and his personal phone several months later.

I suppose it depends what you mean by checked. There is software that can do a quick search for all the picture files on a device in just a few minutes.

But finding a picture is only part of the process. You then have to decide if the picture is illegal or not. That's a judgment call. Usually there are thousands of images on a single device, with the overwhelming majority being perfectly legal, but they all have to be looked at individually, just to make sure. So its that which will take the time, plus categorising the illegal ones as A,B or C.

With movies its even more tricky, because a film could have something illegal in the middle of it, so they might have to watch the whole thing, just to find the illegal part.

Some of these processes can be automated, but others require a person to sit in front of a screen, possibly for many hours. With some cases there will be one device to examine, but for others there could be multiple devices, phones, extra hard drives, USB sticks and so on.

Each police force has its own way of working. It's true that there is a database of existing images and there is software which can compare all the images on a device against that database.

It's also possible to put that software onto a USB and take it to the person's home on the day of the arrest, meaning that they could check the devices right there, in a matter of minutes.

But it's by no means certain that all police forces are doing this. They may not have purchased the licences for that particular software for example. Then there is the other problem of images that are new and not on the database already.

So to be absolutely certain there is nothing illegal on a device, it's still going to be necessary to do a full examination. They may find images very quickly and stop looking at that point, or it may take longer to find the images if they are being hidden in some way, or if the device is encrypted.

With so many different variables involved, its almost impossible to give a time frame. Every case is unique.

Hi

I'm not completely sure of an answer, but my experience was 9 months from handing in multiple devices. Originally oic said 6to9months in the queue.

My oic said it was a computer program which looked through the devices and itendified any illegal images and categorised them. But they also look at deleted content, any downloaded softwares relating to the dark Web, websites visited etc etc. Some images are then checked by a real person if needed.

Unfortunately it's a how long is a piece of string answer.



Edit-just to add, if you Have your officer in charge contact I'd just contact them and ask if they have any updates on the device search. Months is a long time but I guess they could be putting together the findings

ready for a 2nd interview?