Mr. Drew Harris:

Rather than use the example of the disorder on 23 November, the example we can talk more authoritatively about is the examination of child abuse material. In a very recent example I looked at last week, in a two-month period, one phone gathered some 650,000 images. In effect, this individual grooms children and then through threat and intimidation, exploits them but also encourages them and demands them to produce other victims as well.

From that, we identified 54 children as victims, of whom 51 were actually identified. All of them were beyond this jurisdiction, so it required considerable international co-operation. One can imagine how impossible it would be to try to do that manually with a phone with 650,000 images. It is in this context that we talk about sifting through images quickly to look for groups or identifiable characteristics. That goes beyond the individual. It can be the room, the language on the spines of books in the background, school identification and simple things like light switches, electrical sockets and furniture. These are the details we look for. The specialist software for this purpose speeds up that process immeasurably. What is the work of a number of weeks in identifying 54 individuals would literally take months if we were to try to work our way through 650,000 images manually. We would not be able to identify 54 separate victims. In the meantime, the months would be rolling on and the abuse would be continuing. The software makes a considerable difference. That is well accepted.

Public disorder is a fast-moving and raw situation and there will need to be a great deal of manual examination, but we would look for individuals with clear characteristics as to their clothing. We would search for those electronically. Even if we just got the clues, the space-time continuum means they must travel down a certain route to get from A to B. We would look for the other footage manually to show us what was happening in between, which premises they were in or what actions they engaged in, hopefully leading to their identification.