So many paedophiles are being arrested for downloading child pornography police forces in the West are in danger of being overwhelmed, a leading child protection charity warned last night.
Just a handful of police computer experts are tasked with investigating hundreds of computers each year, with the West among the country's worst areas for the crime.
Thousands of computers are being seized across the country, but few officers are tasked with the job of securing evidence to convict the paedophiles of downloading or making child abuse images.
The NSPCC asked all forces in the country how many computers they confiscated, how many arrests they made in a year and how many officers they had working on the crime.
In Avon & Somerset, the team is 13-strong. They arrested 112 paedophiles in the past year, but seized 466 computers, and so had the task of breaking through the computers' security and extracting the evidence at the rate of two a day.
Of the forces that replied to the Freedom of Information Act request, Wiltshire had the largest number of people arrested for child pornography in the country – with 208 people arrested for downloading abuse images in the year 2012-2013.
Officers in Wiltshire seized 249 computers, but had just six specialist officers working on the investigations.
In Gloucestershire, there were seven officers and 45 people had been arrested for accessing child pornography. Dorset Constabulary did not respond to the FoI request.
Nationally, nearly 5,000 computers were seized by just over a third of the 43 forces in England and Wales last year, the charity said.
Jon Brown, NSPCC lead for tackling sexual abuse, said: "The volume of devices and the number of images on each device that forces are having to work through is increasing."
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