Fire Law Blog Fire Service and Public Safety Legal Issues Blog by Curt Varone
Today’s burning question: I am assigned to our fire investigations unit and we are working on a policy to address how we handle the photos that we take. We are planning to use a single SD card for each incendiary, fatal or otherwise difficult fire, but for the more routine fires, car fires and kitchen fires, we are thinking about using the same SD card. We would prefer to not waste a separate SD card for every little fire. What do you recommend?
Answer: My recommendation is you sit down with the following, and determine what they want you to do:
- Attorney general/district attorney responsible for prosecuting arson cases
- State fire marshal
- Local police
That said, if I were the local prosecutor, I would advise you to treat all photos as evidence and develop a secure location to download and archive the photos to. This could be a secure location on the city/FD network, or a separate evidence quality storage medium. It needs to be bullet proof… secure and (possibly) encrypted with backup in accordance with whatever protocols the prosecutor/police require.
Once investigative photos are taken they should be downloaded from the SD card using forensic copying software so that no metadata is lost. This should be done reasonably soon after the photos are taken, preferably after each fire. Then the SD card should be reformatted and can be reused.
Again – that is me… which won’t carry much weight. You need to get agreement from the prosecutor, the state fire marshal and law enforcement.
