Internationally known for its natural beauty with stunning lakes, mountains and valleys, the police force charged with protecting Cumbria, England, also wants it to be known for its safety, especially given the English countryside attracts millions of tourists every year – infusing billions into the economy.

“We work along a principle called the 4C’s, which is contempt for criminality, compassion for victims, community focus and care for our colleagues,” said Andy Myers, Detective Superintendent who oversees the forensics department within Cumbria Constabulary, which includes the Digital Forensic Unit (DFU).

Nearly all investigations have a digital component.

“We are now a department of 15 staff, myself included. A hybrid of police officers and police staff, and we deliver service 365 days a year,” said Ralph Henderson, who has managed the DFU since 2019 and has been with the police force since 1986. “We have grown because of digital as an impact, more and more investigations, storage of devices increases, complexity of examining devices increases. We want to meet the demands of our colleagues  to help the system meet that demand and deliver business over the weekend or whatever time of day it’s required.”

Victim-centered Approach to Policing

Digital evidence is core to each case they work. “We’re duty-bound, we’re  ethical. We do things right and see where the evidence takes us. Whether it takes us to or from what we believe in our initial hypothesis,” Myers said.

They work closely with the 43 police forces throughout the nation, including sharing information and backing other agencies up when resources, such as lab expertise, are needed. Myers explained that the National Crime Agency supports them with online child abuse investigations.

“When we’ve got evidence that somebody has accessed illegal images of children, they provide us that initial information, which the online child abuse investigation team works on  to support them with digital forensics. A big proportion of work is servicing the teams that look at those who abuse children online,” Myers said. “We’ve also got a real focus on violence against women and girls, a real focus on rape and serious sexual offences, which we prioritise.”

“We’re very victim-focused in Cumbria,” Henderson explained.

One of the tools in their DFU solutions arsenal is Cellebrite Inseyets which helps provide access capabilities to most mobile phones, allowing the team to work on every case that comes to their lab, reducing unnecessary delays to investigation.

The Need for a Cloud Solution

Cumbria’s beautiful land is expansive, making up more than 4200 kilometers (2600 square miles). It can take an hour and a half to drive from one part of the county to another.

“A lot of people are having to travel into our unit, and that impacts the size of our unit. It has an impact on the environment, with all the travel, there are fuel costs, vehicle wear, there’s staff time. A cloud-based solution made absolute sense,” Myers explained.

Cumbria is currently getting accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) to fully implement Cellebrite Guardian, a cloud-based evidence management and review system where they will intake cases and easily share digital evidence via the cloud.

“It gives that reassurance to our victims, to the courts that what we are doing has been reviewed by a national body and they are happy that it meets the required standards so that we’re not leaving ourselves wide open to miscarriages of justice questioned by defence lawyers,” Myers explained.

In its initial stages, Cumbria is realizing Guardian’s potential to help them achieve justice quicker.

“If an officer can view a phone report in their own policing area that can respond in their only policing area very rapidly, they can give that support to the community,” Myers said. “It helps keep Cumbria safe as opposed to them being potentially an hour and a half away from where the designated station is. So, to enable them to  view from anywhere in the county, it’s fantastic for us.”

“From a security point of view, it’s got some real bonuses in the fact that you’re not having bit-locked hard drives and USBs travelling up and down the countryside, when it can be almost instantaneous to deliver that data to the organization or colleagues that needs it,” Henderson said.

Myers added, “Early in my career, you’d have issues with downloads because of bandwidth speeds where the files would crash. You’re not having that now. It is instant. The investigating officer can access that and doesn’t have those same issues, which causes frustration and can affect the morale of officers, as well.”

Officer morale is critical to their work in policing.

“We’ve had positive feedback from officers in areas saying it’s, it’s actually a breath of fresh air,” Myers added. “We’re getting instant access. We’re not having to travel, we’re not having those issues with the file crashing or taking a number of hours to actually download onto our terminal. Those are real positives for me. It’s creating a better work environment for the team, which as you know, a happy team, you get better results.”

A Self-Proclaimed ‘Techie’ Ties Together Evidence

Another tenured member of the team is Detective Louise Rayment, who’s been with Cumbria Constabulary for 21 years. While working on the Drug Squad, she got a call from her supervisor about an opening for the new Digital Media Investigators course. “He said, ‘You’re a bit techie. Can you go on this course next week?’ So off I went,” she recalled, “I’ve always been a bit techie, my dad was a techie, so it’s in my blood.” And now, she’s been working in the digital forensics space for just shy of a decade.

There’s been a lot of change in that time, particularly in the amount of and type of data held on a device. “You can’t even compare the two,” she said, speaking on submitting phones to DFUs (Digital Forensic Units) for extraction. “The types of data that you get now is, you would never have dreamt of getting that back then.”

Detective Rayment uses Cellebrite Pathfinder to find connections between multiple devices in investigations. In 2020, the department received its first trial of the AI-powered solution. “When we got everything loaded in and we looked at the analytical tools that Pathfinder could provide us, it literally almost made me cry. I mean, it was going to cut my overtime budget massively because I wasn’t going to be doing things manually,” she said.

One case in particular involved a woman who Rayment said “literally lived on her phone,” it was 175 GB of data on one device. While the data download gave exceptional information, the sheer amount was overwhelming – “to then review it – manually, that phone took me six weeks. I put it into Pathfinder and it took me four days.”

Investigating a Person’s Disappearance, The Digital Witness Leads Police to the Killer

In October 2023, a person was reported missing, disappearing somewhere along the route from Scotland to England. Evidence suggested murder, yet the body wasn’t found until the following May in the Cumbria woods.

“Cellebrite products supported our extractions on the phone, which got us evidence quite well,” Myers said. The digital evidence led them to a suspect whom the victim had previously met on a dating app. The suspect was found driving the victim’s car.

Investigators used Pathfinder to build the case. “That evidence supported his ultimate conviction,” Myers said.

The suspect is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of victim.

Keeping Training Top of Mind

Showing competence in digital forensics and the evidence they present in court is critical to getting convictions.

“We train where we need to and then they have to show competence on an annual basis. It’s a competency record over the 12 months, what software they’ve used, what techniques they’ve used, what processes they’ve used,” Myers said, adding that they do a proficiency testing with an accredited third-party who checks the results. They also have a little competitive fun with other agencies.

“We give it to an examiner to do whether it’s mobile phones, acquisition of computers, whether it’s process and analysis of computers,” Myers explained. “We send off our results from their question sets and our processes, and we will be put into a group with potentially another six or seven other agencies. We are given a result at the end of it of how we fared on the question set and where we sat in that group.

We generally come out, we generally do very well in it, but we learn from it as well.”

Henderson added, “That’s where we have our SOPs, our standard operating procedures, because it’s all about repeatability and revisiting it later and shown in it and checking. You know, when one of the examiners finishes an examination, it goes to another examiner to look at the processes they’ve done and the techniques they’ve used to make sure they haven’t missed anything or whether they’ve done anything differently before it gets signed off.”