Misconduct that has an impact on the investigation and prosecution of crime has to be regarded as serious. The criminal justice system plays a vital part in keeping the public safe and in ensuring that the rule of law is upheld. It is essential that the public should be able to trust the police to play their proper part in ensuring that those who commit crimes are brought to justice. Conversely, the rule of law means that those who are not guilty of crimes should have the opportunity to exculpate themselves. Misconduct that undermines public trust in the process of bringing those guilty of serious offences to justice, or the process of preventing innocent people from early exculpation, must be punished severely. The retrieval, examination and storage of data in electronic formats has become essential to the investigation and prosecution of crime. Whether in the form of text or images, the collection and storage of data is an essential tool of contemporary policing and is now fundamental to the administration of justice. Electronic databases may hold vast amounts of personal and sensitive material. Those who work for the police may be entrusted with privileged access to large amounts of data that may touch on the personal lives of victims, suspects and members of the public alike. If data is copied or disseminated other than in lawful ways for lawful purposes, it carries the inevitable risk that neither the police nor the victims of crime nor their families will be able to control who sees it or the circumstances in which it is viewed. Statements from family members may movingly describe the deep distress caused by their loss of control of the treatment of those for whom they grieve. The harmful effects of the misuse of electronic images may be impossible to rectify. The ease with which images may be disseminated by electronic means (via phones, laptops and other devices) and the difficulty in controlling their spread is an important aspect of the harm caused by offences of this kind. In relation to images of the dead in particular, the act of creating, accessing or copying such images, if unauthorised, will amount to a failure to accord dignity and respect to those who have died and their families. This loss of dignity and respect is an integral part of the harm that may be caused by offences of this kind and warrants appropriate, and sometimes condign punishment in itself. The harm caused by sending images to others is not limited to distribution of images to members of the public who are not bound by the same duties of confidentiality as police officers. When images are shown or distributed by one police officer to another in these sort of circumstances this has a corrosive and pernicious effect, putting pressure on colleagues to collude in activity that demeans the police and is hidden from those who have responsibility for the effective investigation of crime (paras 9–14).