Rochester PD cuts time-to-evidence and advances victim protection with Magnet One

Some cases stay with you when the workday ends. For Chief of Police James Franklin of the Rochester Police Department, investigations involving child exploitation are especially heavy, the worst of the worst crimes, as he puts it. With nearly 30 years in law enforcement and a father who served as a chief before him, Franklin has watched the caseload grow faster than the teams assigned to work it.

Just a few years ago, Rochester PD received an average of three Cybertips per month related to internet crimes against children (ICAC). Today that number is closer to 15.

Each search warrant that follows can uncover multiple devices, and each device can hold a terabyte of data, evidence that must be processed, reviewed, and acted on while children may still be at risk.

Franklin isn’t alone in facing that pressure. Most agencies, he says, are understaffed and underusing the technology available to help. Rochester PD decided to do something about it and has become a leader in cloud-based digital investigations, building a faster, more connected approach to evidence so investigators can act when it matters most.

Rochester PD didn’t just add new tools. It changed how digital evidence moves through an investigation. Jason Bennett, an analyst with the Technology Forensics Unit, describes a process that was little more than manual copying of data from one point to another, and a lot of sitting and waiting.

Now, with several tools unified in one platform, that wait has shrunk from weeks to hours. Rochester investigators and examiners receive a link to evidence the same day, often within minutes of extraction.

For Detective Brock Neumann, an affiliate to the Minnesota ICAC and Human Trafficking task forces, that speed is everything—the sooner the team can establish probable cause, the sooner they can identify a child in danger and get them out.

Rochester PD built its approach around a connected suite of Magnet Forensics tools that work together across every stage of the digital evidence workflow, from acquisition through review, and alongside output from other tools already in use.

Fast mobile acquisition with Magnet Graykey

To begin the workflow, investigators extract data from devices using Magnet Graykey and immediately move it into the broader system. For many high-stakes cases, mobile data is sent to the cloud through Magnet One Case Stream as it’s being acquired, making evidence available to investigators the same day, often within minutes.

Hands-off processing with Magnet Automate

With Magnet Automate, once an acquisition is complete it goes straight into a workflow that handles the processing automatically, running continuously, often overnight, without requiring hands-on time.

Targeted media discovery with Magnet Griffeye®

Working across massive datasets, speed depends on quickly finding what matters. Rochester examiners and investigators use Magnet Griffeye® to search and prioritize media evidence at scale. In one case, Detective Daniel Fitterer faced 275,000 video and image files, a task he said took forever to work through manually.

After installing the Thorn.AI plugin, Griffeye combed through the hundreds of thousands of files within two hours. “It gave me the 15 images and videos I needed to charge and convict the suspect,” Fitterer said. Evidence that had seemed impossibly buried was in hand within a single session.

Unified casework with Magnet Axiom

Lieutenant Frank Ohm, leader of the Investigations Division, relies on Magnet Axiom to bring all digital evidence together in a single case file, enabling the team to cross-reference evidence in the same case. The result, he says, is a massive time and resource savings that gives investigators greater confidence in the end result.

Shared digital evidence and connected workflows in Magnet One

Magnet One is the platform that keeps it all connected—cases pull in evidence from across the entire workflow, giving examiners and investigators a single place to work and collaborate in real time. Instead of waiting for reports or handoffs, teams review and act on evidence in real time, wherever they are. In one trafficking case involving 28 devices from one suspect, the data acquired with Magnet Graykey was automatically sent to Magnet Review within Magnet One. Detectives immediately gathered images of the victim in the suspect’s house, and right away, they had enough for an arrest and charges.

For agencies hesitant about moving sensitive data to the cloud, Rochester PD’s experience is instructive. The department moved forward with confidence, backed by encryption safeguards and the cost savings of cloud infrastructure over local processing.

Rochester PD’s connected workflow came into focus in what became a global case.

What started as a single child solicitation Cybertip quickly revealed its full scope. With a search warrant, detectives seized multiple devices and extracted the data, uncovering thousands of attempts to solicit children and victims spread across the world. Using Magnet Axiom and Magnet Griffeye, what Neumann calls “an ICAC investigator’s best friend,” the team applied facial recognition and filters to identify the scope of victims, tracked the suspect’s social connections and conversations, then shared the evidence with state and federal partners.

For Chief Franklin, the benefits of cloud-based investigations will only extend further. Encrypting and pushing evidence to the cloud, he says, will enhance investigations and make law enforcement more efficient in combating serious crime.

Protecting victims is the reason everyone at Rochester PD keeps coming back to such a challenging job. An innovative approach to digital evidence doesn’t just lift the burden, it multiplies what the team can accomplish. Before, a single analyst’s work reached one victim at a time. Now, with purpose-built technology that puts the same evidence in the hands of five or 10 investigators simultaneously, that impact compounds across every case.