Chris Truran previously worked as a member of SOCO with the Metropolitan Police. He came to speak about forensics and began his presentation by reminding us of the history where Korea started to use walkie-talkie radios which weren’t very efficient. But from then technology improved with the introduction of the first mobile phones in the 1970s. The mobile phone has moved on a lot since the early Nokia’s and now their capabilities mean that the average smart phone can hold 1.5million pages of information, 10,000 text messages, 18,000 photographs and 13,000 tunes. Chris explained how three mobile phones masts can now pinpoint where a mobile phone is down to centimetres, and this technology was important in the arrest of Ian Huntley for the Soham murders. The first clue was that one of the girls checked to see how much data she had left on her phone while she was standing outside his house.
Chris also spoke about CCTV and the early introduction in Middlesborough where the CCTV cameras also had microphones. The cameras were monitored and if someone was misbehaving they would be reprimanded publicly using the loud hailer facility.
Chris told us about the various cameras that led to the arrest of the Couzens for the Sarah Everard murder which included RING doorbells, facial recognition, a car dash camera and bus cameras. He also told us about Luminol and UV lighting which is used to look for blood traces.
We all went home more aware and wary and thinking about what we could do to keep our data and ourselves safer