"Identification and tracing is the ability to trace, attribute, and confirm the identity of a person, location or activity to evidential levels, such as tracing missing persons.
The ability to manage the variety and quantity of digital forensic material recovered during investigations, in a manner that maintains privacy and minimises the intrusion for victims, is an urgent priority for policing. Our interests span multiple disciplines since we seek not only best-in-class digital tooling for the analysis of text, media, and metadata, but also improvements in process, workflow, and our ability to ensure digital forensic awareness across the workforce. This includes ‘democratising’ the ability to run safe, rapid, and effective forensics at scene, be it through ‘lab in a box’ technologies or by other means. We are particularly interested in advances that can support crypto-currency investigations."
"We welcome your engagement with our ARIs in the following ways:
• If you have evidence that completely or partly supports or answers one of our ARIs, we invite you to share that with us. For any ongoing research relevant to policing and crime reduction, we encourage you to register your research on the College of Policing’s research projects map, which has been designed to promote collaboration and support requests for participants.
• If you are, or plan to be, carrying out research that relates to one of our ARIs, we’d like to hear about it. While we cannot respond to speculative approaches for research funding, we will where possible act to support your ambitions, including finding you policing partners where possible.
• If you are submitting a funding or grant application that aligns with one of our ARIs, we hope that referencing policing’s ARIs will help to strengthen your case for the possible public impact of the research.
• We will use the ARI document to structure our academic engagement, prioritise events and build new connections with external partners. We will be using our ARIs in our engagement with UKRI, and we will publish any opportunities for funding via our website https://science.police.uk/
Please send any correspondence and questions to csa@npcc.police.uk, including ‘ARI’ in the subject heading."
This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:
Digital evidence can reveal a suspect's intent to commit an offence and help establish when events occurred, where victims and suspects were and with whom they communicated. It has been increasingly used in examinations ...
Funded by: ESRC
Lead research organisation: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
This project specifically focuses on the use of digital forensics in policing and addresses the challenges related to privacy and victim intrusion, aligning well with the question.
Over 90% of reported crime involves a digital device, and the increased use of digital devices in criminality has resulted in significant backlogs within the departments that forensically examine these devices. Despite t...
Funded by: ESRC
Lead research organisation: University College London
While this project focuses on digital evidence triage at the crime scene, it does not directly address the risks to personal privacy and victim intrusion, but it partially aligns with the question by discussing the backlog issues in digital forensics.
With the growth of the world-wide web (WWW), there has been a corresponding growth in crimes that use the WWW. Specialist law enforcement investigators are ever more frequently required to examine PCs, laptops, mobile ph...
Funded by: EPSRC
Lead research organisation: King's College London
This project addresses the challenges of digital forensic investigations and evidence quantification, which are related to the emerging risks in digital forensic technologies, but it does not directly focus on personal privacy and victim intrusion.