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A 37-second cell-phone video made news this year when it led to the conviction of former University of Minnesota football player Dominic Jones for fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct.

But the discovery of the deleted cell-phone video by Minneapolis police was by no means an isolated incident. Armed with search warrants, Minneapolis police are increasingly scanning cell phones for evidence -- they have handled 68 such searches this year -- and they have new electronic tools to help with the job.

It's a case of police work catching up with consumer electronics. Consumers may be familiar with a device that cell-phone providers use to copy an address book from an old phone to a new one. Now police have a "forensic" version of the device that uncovers scientific evidence for court cases by copying a lot more than address books.

The $4,000 device from Israeli firm Cellebrite, called the UFED (universal forensic extraction device), can read and copy a cell phone's video, photos, text messages, call history and personal audio recordings. Minneapolis police upgraded this year from the firm's consumer-grade device to the forensic one.

The UFED can read data from more than 1,400 cell-phone models, said Jason Rogers, Cellebrite's vice president of sales in Franklin Lakes, N.J. The firm has sold 3,500 of the units to law enforcement agencies since it was introduced 11 months ago, he said.

"You can extract the data in two to three minutes, and it's simple to use," Rogers said. "Just plug it into the cell phone."

Officer Dale Hanson of the Minneapolis Police Crime Lab, one of two officers who found the cell-phone video in the Jones case, says his department has been using the Cellebrite unit for several months, and said it works as advertised.

It isn't the only such product out there; police also use two types of PC-based software and -- as a backup -- they can laboriously photograph every screen in a cell phone's memory. But the Cellebrite unit has the advantage of being a self-contained device that, unlike personal computers, doesn't have technical conflicts with some cell-phone models, he said.

Even in cases where the evidence is less stark than the video in the Jones case, scanning a cell phone can help investors solve a crime, Hanson said.

"There was a homicide case in which the suspect called the victim, told the victim where to meet him and then killed the victim there," Hanson said, though the call history was only part of what helped detectives trace the suspect's steps. "When we pulled the call data off the suspect's cell phone, and compared it to other cell phone records we got through subpoena, we had a good fix on where the call was made from and where it was received."

Steve Alexander • 612-673-4553