When the Witness Is the Phone: A Patrol Officer's Guide to Digital Evidence at the Scene

The witness who saw everything is standing right there. So is the one who didn't say a word — the phone in the victim's pocket, the doorbell camera across the street, the cloud account that synced the moment before the suspect wiped the device. Digital evidence doesn't forget. It doesn't recant. It doesn't fail to show up to court. But it disappears fast, and the window to preserve it correctly is often measured in hours.