Оn the Concept of Digital Transformation in Criminalistics

When analyzing digital transformation in view of the theory and practice of criminalistics, experts single out various trends based on the general understanding of this process against the background of the country’s industrial development. The author states that, within this context, digital transformation is usually understood as a process of widespread multimodal introduction of digital technologies with the goal of gaining a considerable socio-economic effect. The author also pays attention to the volume and content of the very concept of «digital transformation» in the terminological apparatus of the language of criminalistics. It is stated that this phrase, borrowed from the sphere of digital economy into scientific criminalistic discourse, is used rather more metaphorically than terminologically, and does not have an unambiguous link to a specific denotatum. Criminalists stress that modern crime is migrating to cyberspace, actively using cutting-edge information-telecommunication technologies and proactively adapting to the digital transformations in all spheres of economic and social life. The use of hi tech in criminal activities modifies the traditional interpretations of such criminalistic categories as time, place, technique, means, tools of committing crimes, and influences the means and methods of crime counteraction. Nevertheless, it has no impact on the fundamental laws constituting the object of cognition in criminalistics as a science. The paper states that digital transformation in the practice of criminalistics should be viewed in a technological way — from the standpoint of information and computer-technical support of criminalistic technique, tactics and methodology, the organization of work processes of solving, investigating and preventing crimes. It is concluded that digital transformation, aimed at the global digitization of forensic technologies, does not touch upon the axiological tenets of the general theory (methodology) of criminalistic science whose gnoseological basis does not depend on the digital or analogue form of the carrier of forensically relevant information, but is conditioned by the process of retrospective cognition of the crime by the subject of investigation.