Protecting the people doing the hardest jobs
Authored by Lynita Hinsch
Originally published in the August 2026 issue of Magnet Unlocked. Want to be the first to see new content? Sign up for our monthly newsletter, Magnet Unlocked.
Every examiner knows what chain of custody requires. Every item gets labeled and cataloged.
Images are verified. Every transfer documented. Every handoff tracked. Every step defensible.
We built an entire discipline around proving evidence can survive scrutiny in court. What doesn’t get the same rigor is anything that protects the examiner who’s there at every step.
Before anything happens, someone has to manually review the material. The evidence had a chain of custody. The examiner doesn’t.
The gap in the process
Our processes have rarely asked the question: What is the cost of repeated exposure?
Whether an examiner is reviewing child exploitation material, investigating fraud, conducting incident response, or analyzing thousands of communications in a complex case, the profession is built around procedural precision. Yet the human impact of that work has historically been treated as a personal challenge rather than an operational one.
For years, the expectation was simple; the mission came first because the work had to get done. Investigators absorbed the personal cost and kept moving forward.
Why this remains invisible
Part of the reason this issue receives so little attention is that most people never see it.
Years ago, I watched a public official review statistics showing the scale of child exploitation investigations across multiple jurisdictions. Despite the data sitting directly in front of him, his response was essentially that this couldn’t really be happening here.
That reaction has stayed with me because it reflects something larger. Most people don’t want to look too closely at certain realities. They want the arrest, the prosecution, the resolution, and the happy ending. They don’t want to think about the work required to get there.
We’ve all seen the social media post where bystanders were openly criticizing law enforcement investigators during an arrest. The moment they learned the officers were responding on a child exploitation case, the crowd’s attitude changed completely. Suddenly, everyone understood there was something serious happening. People recognize that this work carries a cost. They just rarely think about who pays it.
The burden we don’t measure
When experienced investigators leave the profession, we don’t simply lose headcount. We lose judgment. We lose expertise. We lose institutional knowledge built over years, sometimes decades, of difficult work. Most importantly, we lose people willing to do jobs many others could (and simply would) not do.
The digital evidence challenge only makes this more urgent.
Across both public and private sector investigations, the volume of data continues to grow. Investigators are dealing with more devices, more cloud data, more communications, and more cases than ever before. The problem isn’t confined to one discipline or one geography. It’s becoming universal.
The question is no longer whether investigators are under pressure. The question is how long we can expect people to absorb that pressure without changing how the work is done.
From resilience to sustainability
For years, conversations about wellness largely focused on resilience. Today, the conversation is increasingly about sustainability.
How do we help investigators build careers that last?
How do we reduce unnecessary exposure without compromising investigations?
How do we retain experienced practitioners for ten, twenty, or even thirty years?
Technology has an important role to play. The digital forensics community has spent decades building tools that protect evidence integrity, improve investigative efficiency, and help teams manage ever-growing volumes of data. We should be applying that same mindset to investigator exposure.
If an examiner has to review the same material repeatedly, that’s a process problem. If difficult content is being surfaced unnecessarily, that’s a workflow problem. If investigators are spending valuable time manually sorting material that technology can reliably classify or prioritize, that’s an opportunity to reduce exposure while improving efficiency.
This is where wellness-focused capabilities in Magnet Griffeye become important.
Features designed to identify known material, automate categorization, prioritize relevant content, and reduce the amount of unnecessary manual review aren’t simply productivity enhancements. They help limit the number of times an investigator needs to be exposed to the most difficult material in a case.
That’s an important distinction.
The goal isn’t to remove human judgment from investigations. The goal is to make sure human judgment is applied where it matters most, while reducing needless exposure everywhere else.
Viewed through that lens, wellness isn’t a separate conversation from investigative effectiveness. It’s part of the same engineering challenge.
The future of the profession depends on it
For decades, our industry has focused on the question: How do we solve more cases?
It’s an important question.
The long-term success of this profession won’t be determined solely by solving more cases with better tools, faster computing, or sophisticated AI.
It will be determined by whether we can continue attracting, supporting, and retaining the people willing to do work that most of society never sees and rarely wants to think about.
We spent decades perfecting procedures to protect evidence.
It’s time we applied that same discipline to protecting the people who handle it.