Encrypted iPhones impacting local criminal investigations

iPhones stall local investigations due to encryption.

Ryan Yamamoto, KXTV 1:33 PM. PST February 21, 2016

SACRAMENTO – The common smartphone has become a tool that criminals can use to commit a crime, and when that does happen law enforcement typically find a lot of evidence inside the phone’s data.

“I can speak personally from homicides that I investigated,” said Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputy Tony Turbull. “There were a lot of cases solved based on the information we were able to get out of the phones.”

But since 2014, when Apple updated the software on it’s IPhones, the encrypted phones have made cases more difficult to solve.

The problem so big, in a recent interview in Newsweek, Assistant Chief Deputy for the Sacramento County District Attorney’s office said there were “well over 100” IPhones stored in evidence that cannot be opened for police investigations.

The issue making national headlines as the FBI and Justice Department now fighting Apple to help them break the encryption of the IPhone of Syed Farook- one of the terrorist gunman in the San Bernardino shootings.

Apple has so far refused. CEO Tim Cook issuing a long letter to his customers.

“The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe,” said Cook.

At the State Capitol, former Sacramento County Sheriff’s Captain and Assemblyman Jim Cooper recently introduced a bill that would require phone makers in California to build a backdoor to the encryption.

He believes Apple is helping to protect criminals.

"If you have child pornography you are ok, If you have human trafficking you are ok... if you are a terrorist and you have information text pictures,” said Cooper. “It is ok because law enforcement can't do nothing about it, so it actually sends the wrong message."

Local law enforcement agrees.

"What we are doing is no different than writing a search warrant into somebody's home, writing a search warrant into somebody's safe, writing a search warrant into somebody's computer... in somebody's car,” said Turnbull.