New grading system will 'drastically reduce' police exposure to indecent images

It's hoped change will also speed up prosecutions

It's hoped a new system for categorising indecent images of children will drastically reduce police officers' exposure to such material as well as speeding up prosecutions.

Currently, images found in investigations on the Island have to be viewed and manually graded by officers.

The Child Abuse Image Database, which is already in place in England and Wales, features 182 million images linked to previous cases which have already been categorised.

It means if officers find an image which has been part of a previous investigation, they won't need to rate it again.

Grading the images is part of the prosecutions process, with the more severe categories carrying higher sentences.

The use of CAID will also see the Island move away from the Copine scale, which ranks images from one to five; instead images will now be rated in category A if they're the most severe, and category C for the least serious images.

This change will align the grading categories with the UK, allowing Manx officers to use CAID's AI grading tool.

Detective Superintendent Steve Maddocks says the change will have a big impact on the officers involved: