west midlands police force

Officers can now log into the analysis platform from their station and review all exhibit data in situ instead of travelling to the digital forensic team’s offices — saving critical time and resources and dramatically speeding up investigations. 

“When you understand that around 75% of the cases we handle deal with indecent images of children, you can see why speed and accuracy are so important,” explains DS Price KPM. “We are often the ones who identify abuse of children and vulnerable persons and then work with the appropriate team to help safeguard victims — even before we move to detain perpetrators. Using this tool, cases that once took months now take weeks. Those that took days can be solved in hours. As such, I can categorically say that the solution has safeguarded children and other vulnerable victims and kept them from further harm.” 

Node4’s solution helps West Midlands Police Force comply with the regulations governing how it stores and manages digital data. This includes ISO17025 2017, which sets out standards for holding and dealing with exhibits. It’s also compliant with the Forensic Science Regulators Act and adheres to Management of Police Information (MOPI) standards. Node4 also monitors all existing regulations and, when necessary, adjusts storage policies within its managed cloud environment — removing worries about compliance management from the team’s daily to-do list.  

“You can imagine, with the data we’re dealing with, trust between us and our managed services provider is imperative — and we have established a high degree of trust with Node4,” notes DS Price KPM. “We explained our data management and security requirements to Node4 upfront, which were then built into the framework.”

From an administrative and budgetary standpoint, moving to the cloud has given the digital forensics team the elasticity to scale when data requirements increase. It also allows the team to pull back on capacity when the demand is not so great. This helps keep departmental IT-related costs down and enables the team to work at the same fast pace, regardless of the number of cases or data volume.

DS Price KPM concludes: “There’s an honest passion from the Node4 team to get this right for us. Their support has been superb throughout the design and roll-out process, with team members going consistently above and beyond. They understand the importance of our work and the intensity and urgency that drives our department. And they’ve delivered the tools and framework that allow us to work quickly, accurately and professionally to protect some of society’s most vulnerable people.”