Criminal investigations don’t look like they did a decade ago. What was once a manageable flow of reports and physical evidence has transformed into a relentless stream of digital material. On Breaking Battlegrounds, District Attorney Dan Dow described just how dramatically the landscape has shifted — and why many offices are struggling to keep pace. The core issue isn’t a lack of effort. It’s scale.

A Tenfold Increase in Evidence

When asked how workloads have changed since he first took office in 2014, Dow pointed to the sheer volume of digital evidence now attached to modern cases. According to him, offices today are dealing with roughly ten times the electronic data they handled ten years ago, and possibly more. That growth is being driven by the rapid spread of recording and tracking technology in everyday life. Investigations now routinely involve:

  • Body-worn police cameras

  • In-car video systems

  • Private surveillance footage from homes and businesses

  • Data pulled from wearable devices

  • Vehicle infotainment system records

Each new source can be valuable. Together, they create a mountain of material that must be reviewed carefully and disclosed properly.

The Strain Behind the Scenes

One of the most significant pressures is falling on paralegals and evidence teams — the people responsible for organizing and preparing digital material for court. Dow explained that while the workload has surged, budgets have not kept pace. His office, like many others, has faced limits on hiring additional staff. That has forced existing teams to manage far more information than the system was originally designed to handle. The result is a growing operational squeeze: more evidence arriving every year, but without proportional increases in manpower.

Investing Early in Digital Forensics

Recognizing the trend early, Dow’s office moved in 2017 to establish a dedicated cyber forensic laboratory. That investment is now proving critical as digital evidence becomes central to nearly every major case. Tools such as Closure AI are being used within that framework to help process and organize large volumes of cyber evidence. The goal is not to replace investigators or legal judgment, but to make it possible for teams to work through material that would otherwise consume enormous amounts of time. Even with budget constraints, Dow noted that these technologies are helping staff move through their responsibilities more efficiently than would otherwise be possible.

The Ongoing Civil Liberties Debate

The conversation also highlighted the tension that often accompanies new investigative technology. Co-host Sam Stone raised a concern shared by many observers: without modern analytical tools, law enforcement risks falling behind increasingly sophisticated criminals. At the same time, expanding technological capabilities inevitably raises questions about privacy and government overreach.

Dow’s position reflected that balancing act. He emphasized his concern about protecting individual freedoms while also ensuring that serious crimes do not remain unsolved simply because investigators lack the tools to process available evidence. It is a debate that is unlikely to fade as digital evidence continues to multiply.

Where This Is Headed

The trend lines are clear. The amount of electronic evidence in criminal cases is growing rapidly, and there is little reason to expect that growth to slow. Prosecutors and investigators now face a structural challenge:

  • More data per case

  • Limited staffing growth

  • Increasing expectations for speed and accuracy

Technological tools are emerging as one of the few scalable ways to manage that pressure. But their adoption will continue to raise important legal and policy questions. For now, one reality is becoming harder to ignore: the justice system has entered the era of big data, whether it was fully prepared or not.

Transcript

**Sam Stone: **D.A. Dow, real quick, we have just a couple minutes left in this segment and then we’re gonna be bringing you back on for the next one here. But you were first elected in 2014. A lot of the things you’re talking about using these tools, like Closure Intelligence 4, the workload for each case, it has to have expanded quite a bit because of the explosion of technology, right?

You have to check a lot more avenues and look for a lot more different sources of information. So just in terms of volume, that has to be an enormous challenge that this can help solve.

D.A. Dan Dow: It’s unbelievable, frankly. Our paralegals in our office that often receive the evidence and have to sit through it and sort it and then discover it to the defense attorney when we have a case filed, that volume has exponentially grown. I mean, I couldn’t even give you an exact number, but it’s probably 10 times the amount of electronic data now that we have than what we did 10 years ago, maybe higher.

And so body-worn cameras, in-unit videos, people’s surveillance video at their stores, in their retail establishments or their homes. Data from an electronic device like an Apple Watch, smart devices, the infotainment systems on vehicles. All of this has overwhelmed law enforcement. I’m real proud of our community. We invested in 2017 in creating a cyber forensic laboratory of which now Closure AI is one of our tools and resources that we’re using to take all the cyber evidence that we have, analyze it, help us to solve cases.

But I have not been able to, because of budget constraints, been able to hire additional paralegals. But thankfully, those paralegals are able to get through their work more easily because of these technologies.

Sam Stone: And this kind of ties back to Chuck’s question about the Fourth Amendment. I tend to be a fairly libertarian type, but I think we also have to be very realistic in this world, right? When you’re facing that explosion of data that you have to pursue, you need these type of tools. Otherwise, we’re falling behind the people who are looking to commit crime.

D.A. Dan Dow: I hear you, I’m a person that loves freedom, so I don’t want to see government being big brother. But I don’t want to see our communities suffer and have crimes go unsolved just because we don’t have the technology.

Listen to the full episode of Breaking Battlegrounds anywhere you stream your podcasts!