New article by Dr Magdalene Ng and colleagues explores police perspectives on digital evidence in England and Wales
Highlights
1. A qualitative study in England and Wales exploring how police officers understand, interpret, and use digital evidence across the investigative lifecycle.
2. Highlights important gaps in digital literacy, translation, and courtroom understanding that shape the reliability of digital evidence.
3. Proposes reforms which include digital evidence interpretation training, trauma-informed investigative interviewing with regard to digital evidence, and national workflows to reduce epistemic drift (the loss of meaning as digital evidence travels through the investigative chain) in this domain.
What is the study about?
This study explores how police officers in England and Wales make sense of, handle, and strategically use digital evidence, from crime scene to courtroom. Drawing on qualitative interviews with N=13 police officers, it highlights how digital devices and digital evidence are often misunderstood, seized inconsistently, and often misinterpreted. While digital evidence is often viewed as objective and infallible, officers describe its nature to be volatile and highly susceptible to biases in its interpretation. This study also explores how officers use digital evidence during suspect and victim interviews. In the courtroom, participants report a digital literacy gap among lawyers and judges, which means that digital evidence is rarely challenged or fully understood. This paper calls for digital literacy to be treated as a core policing competence and for stronger communication systems to prevent epistemic drift throughout the investigative chain.
Access paper in Behavioral Sciences here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15/10/1416
