Abstract
Evidence management is integral to the rule of law, as it may enable or hinder future claims to justice. In response to public criticism over lost and degraded evidence, Norway is transitioning to relocate evidence from all serious crimes from across the nation to a single facility, designating it critical infrastructure. To consider what the transition reveals about the state's relationship to risks and vulnerabilities of evidence, I draw on empirical data from evidence storage facilities. I find that while the new enforcement of authority and order over evidence provides the state with tools to reclaim legitimacy over justice processes, key issues of the past remain unsolved, and the conditions that grant people access to justice remain largely unaffected. Furthermore, a shift in the temporality of evidence occurs, introducing uncertainty to the stored object, whereby the sense of closure that is so central to justice processes may be lost.
Introduction
In 2022, a fire in an evidence storage facility in New York ‘destroyed an untold amount of “biological evidence”, including DNA from past crimes, like burglaries and shootings – some of it going back 20 or 30 years (…) stored inside barrels made of cardboard, which may have fueled the flames’ (NBC New York Staff, 2023). In an open letter to the mayor of New York, the local non-profit organisation The Legal Aid Society stated that the fire ‘extinguished the hopes of scores of people who were eagerly awaiting DNA testing to exonerate them’ (Loftis and The Legal Aid Society, 2022).
If every contact leaves a trace, as is the foundational principle for criminal investigations (Locard's exchange principle, see Roux et al., 2022 principle 1), every crime object eventually needs a place to be held. Given the vast repercussions of lost, contaminated, or degraded evidence for the administration of justice and for the rights of people involved in an investigation (see Haller, 2001; McCartney and Shorter, 2019, 2023; Shorter and Madland, 2019; West and Meterko, 2015), criminologists and socio-legal scholars should start asking how these spaces are managed. 1 Exploring the state's management and treatment of evidence in the ‘afterlife’ of crime (Biber, 2018a, 2018b) can provide insights into how the state perceives threats and vulnerabilities to law and justice in contemporary society, its priorities in managing those, and their implications for access to justice. Decisions over which evidence to keep and which to destroy (Biber, 2022) and therein the formal legal meanings afforded to the physical objects of crime (see Jones, 2020) may determine which possibilities people involved in crime have to seek justice in the future: if evidence is stored in ways that preserves its quality, it can later be re-analysed and used to re-inform, making the storage of evidence a central responsibility for states to uphold the rule of law.
The relationship between evidence management and future justice is, however, rarely addressed in socio-legal and criminological scholarship. In the present article, I explore how the police and state in Norway – a rechtsstaat or state of justice oriented towards preventing arbitrary uses of power – addresses future risks and vulnerabilities during a major shift in their management of evidence. From 2024, all evidence of crime across the country carrying penalties of 6 or more years imprisonment is relocated from local police stations to a single centralised facility (see Cederkvist, 2024a, 2024b). It is to be stored there indefinitely, making the new facility a sizeable, nearly all-encompassing criminal archive. The change in practice follows complaints by the Office of the Auditor General of Norway that the police have misplaced, contaminated, or lost oversight of evidence in the past (Riksrevisjonen, 2017; see also Cederkvist, 2024a, 2024b), further propelled into public debate following several recent high-profile exonerations and acquittals in part due to poor evidence preservation (e.g. Haugen et al., 2024; NewsinEnglish.no, 2023). This ongoing transition offers a unique lens through which to capture and observe a shifting culture of justice in contemporary society, inviting questions of how evidence management practices influence the state's control over future legal processes, and further, of the roles of law and justice in the structures of state power.
The article begins with an outline of the relationship between criminal archives, power, and the rule of law, and then providing context for the criticisms directed to the Norwegian police and government by other government agencies over poor evidence management. Subsequent sections analyse interviews and observation data collected at both the new long-term storage facility, nine local police stations, and the state's forensic laboratory: first focusing on arbitrary and inconsistent treatment of evidence at local police stations and the challenges to legal protection that interviewees identify, then examining how the new facility aims to address these issues. By drawing on the term ‘documentality’, which encapsulates the fundamental necessity for material objects to prove social phenomena (Ferraris, 2007, 2012, 2017), and perspectives from both archival and security studies, I consider how the state perceives of risks and vulnerabilities related to evidence. I find that while there is an absence of law, the state's documentality of evidence is characterised by authority and order, which enables claims to legitimate government and public reassurance that the rule of law is upheld. While centralisation promises careful indefinite preservation, however, it also puts at risk every object in the archive. Finally, I address the implications this has for case closure and finality in the justice system.
‘Archives, records, power’? Evidence and the rule of law
Evidence management and the police's archives have not yet been so much explored in criminological and socio-legal studies, with some recent exceptions in the UK and Wales (see McCartney and Shorter, 2019, 2023; Shorter and Madland, 2019), and notably through the work by Katherine Biber (2018a, 2018b, 2022) and colleagues (Biber and Luker, 2020; Biber et al., 2021) in Australia. Their work addresses the relationship between evidence preservation, its changing meanings over time, and the consequences of evidence destruction or disposal. Meanwhile, literature is growing around the ‘archival turn’ in the social sciences more broadly, where key questions of which politics or ambitions for governance are reflected in the archives of the state are emerging from a sociological interest in archival studies (see e.g. Brett, 2019, 2021; Ketelaar, 2017; Mawani, 2012; Stoler, 2002, 2008; Trace, 2002). Echoed in this literature is the notion that those documents or objects that are prioritised for registration and preservation in the state's archives directly reflect the state's ambitions for governance: the archives of the state determine both history and the future (Cook, 2007; see also the special section Registering the Everyday: Documents, Bureaucracy, and the Socio-Legal, edited by Smith and Keenan, 2023).
To further understand the relationship between crime and justice narratives, and archived evidence, the concept of ‘documentality’ is analytically useful. According to Ferraris (2007, 2012, 2017), all social phenomena rely on material counterparts to function in society. Documents are understood in the broadest sense of the term, as ‘objects that record social events’ (Ferraris 2007: 386), such as evidence is for crime. In the context of criminal justice where narratives over ‘what happened’ and ‘who is responsible’ are competed over, objects are used to inform, support, and contradict, but more so: to make crime materialise (see also Kruse, 2010, 2016). In one example, Solhjell (2023: 1) notes that ‘a criminal case does not ‘exist’ [without] at least one document in the police database system’, that is: documentation of some form precedes, and thereby enables or prompts, legal and investigatory work. The objects kept in storage wait to set in motion a future production of knowledge.
After a case has closed but while awaiting possible future use, evidence preservation becomes a practice of archiving. It pauses the evidence in time – ideally with its quality and integrity intact – to reinform at a later date (see also McCartney and Shorter, 2019). In a notable contribution on the politics of archives, Schwartz and Cook (2002: 1) ask, ‘what have old, dusty archives, stored away in secure vaults, got to do with power?’. In their work entitled ‘Archives, records, power’, they posit that ‘Whether over ideas or feelings, actions or transactions, the choice of what to record and the decision over what to preserve, and thereby privilege, occur within socially constructed, but now naturalized frameworks that determine the significance of what becomes archives.’ (Schwartz and Cook, 2002: 3).
The Norwegian Context: Evidence Management at the Crossroads
The relationship between evidence and justice has frequented public discourse in Norway in recent years as several exonerations and wrongful administration of justice in high-profile cases have related to the management of evidence (Gulating lagmannsrett, 2023, for English summary see NewsinEnglish.no, 2023; Haugen et al., 2024). A 2017 review by The Office of the Auditor General of Norway revealed that ‘many objects of evidence in the police and sheriff's department are not located where the system indicates they should be’ (Riksrevisjonen, 2017: 49). Oslo Police District – the only police district in Norway with digital systems for oversight (Cederkvist, 2024a) – collects a fifth of all evidence collected in the country but could not account for the location of 12% of their evidence (around 3800 items) when their evidence management was under review (Riksrevisjonen, 2017). The Office of the Auditor General found it ‘reprehensible that risk assessments are not conducted in the area and that there are deficiencies in the management and follow-up of evidence’ (Riksrevisjonen, 2017: 17). An internal police report from 2023 stressed issues at police station evidence storage facilities across the country, including poor inventory management, lacking climate control, security and fire protection, risks of water damage, and pest infestations in rooms where evidence is held (see Cederkvist, 2024b).
To address these issues and replace local evidence storage, a major restructuring of the systems of evidence preservation was initiated in 2021 with the construction of a single centralised facility for long-term evidence storage outside of the capital Oslo (Inderhaug, 2021). The national long-term evidence storage facility, which was operational from 2024, is an object of critical infrastructure, which is an umbrella term for ‘objects, systems, services and resources that secure the fundamental values of society [including] peace and national sovereignty, a democratic state governed by the rule of law, a strong national economy, the welfare of the population, life and health, the environment, and a sense of national security’ (NOU, 2006: 201).
To explore these developments, I visited evidence storage facilities in half of Norway's twelve police districts, between 2022 and 2024. I interviewed 28 crime scene investigators and section leaders at nine police stations; three employees at the new national long-term evidence storage facility; and eight forensic scientists who analyse evidence collected by the police. A key focus was how evidence storage rooms are designed to preserve evidence and the challenges identified by participants. Due to the sensitivity of the materials, the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (SIKT) were informed of the project and approved the data protection plan. The interviews were transcribed and thematically analysed (cf. Braun and Clarke, 2006, 2016) to address storage systems, challenges in evidence management, aspirations for the new facility, and perceptions of legal protection. Audio recordings were not permitted during the visit to the long-term storage facility, but notetaking was, so the data from that site is presented through fieldnotes. All Norwegian quotes and text materials have been translated to English by the author.
Local Storage Dilemmas and Challenges for Justice
The Norwegian police have received criticism over their storage of evidence both prior to and after trial. Beyond the issues addressed in various reports (e.g. Cederkvist 2024b; Riksrevisjonen 2017) such as lacking inventory management, climate control, security, fire protection, risks of water damage and pest infestations, other issues for evidence management were raised by investigators at several of the police stations visited in this study. Indeed, one such issue was space: rooms designated for storing evidence were often-times full at the local police stations I visited, and due to lacking resources to construct subsequent rooms, evidence was stored on tables inside police laboratories, garages, and basements, as one investigator noted: ‘You see how we struggle with space [points to a stack of cardboard boxes]. This is a case, this is case, this is case, this is case. So, you see how we struggle with space. The actual storage room is elsewhere, and we have more rooms like this. We have little space and we’re therefore renovating, but it puts us in a spot where… DNA doesn’t jump, if you know what I mean, so we have to just think that it's [safe]. And it might be that not everything in here will be DNA tested anyway, it could be fingerprints or other things. And this [plastic bag on the floor] is not meant for examination, but we store it, just in case.’ (CSI-9)
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CSI-23: Suddenly leaders or others just show up and walk through here. (…) And of course, when we’ve been fighting for [dedicated storage rooms and new equipment] for almost six years, we gradually lose hope. (…) This [examination table] is from the old operations centre. We’ve refurbished it ourselves and added the tabletop. CSI-24: It's mostly that table that is used for examinations and a bit of storage. But it's definitely not optimal considering that the evidence comes in here. There could be evidence from both the victim and the suspect in a case. Even though it's packed separately, there's still a risk of cross-contamination. CSI-23: And this room is probably 30 years old. CSI-24: The problem arises the day we face a murder case, and they present evidence that it might be the right perpetrator, but then they start looking into how the lab is [organised].
An investigator at a third police station echoed this sentiment and described the lack of storage space as ‘the weak point in the police's system’ (CSI-4). Forensic scientists also shared this perspective, adding ‘we have tried getting away with discarding samples that don’t contain DNA, for example, as a system to avoid [storage issues], but in the long-term, we need a different system’ (FS-12). Another forensic scientist stated that they have storage rooms and evidence freezers ‘all across the city’, and that it is challenging to keep oversight over where evidence and samples are located: [Oversight] is a challenge. We should have had a designated building with a professional system to keep track and order of everything, so that it's not located in big bags with tests from this or that week or this or that type of analysis, as it is today, but rather that there was a computer where you could click “I want that sample” and it found it for you. (FS-4).
Indeed, mess appears a consequence of space issues and arbitrary management such as discretionary practices (cf. Fonseca and Garrido, 2019). An example of this is evidence that has been repurposed by investigators after case closure. An investigator who had a key object of evidence framed in his office explained that it had been collected in his first major murder case and was stored that way since it had been instrumental to his learning (CSI-28). In another instance, an object that had originally been part of a drug trafficking vehicle was located on the desk of one investigator, who explained that he could do with the evidence as he wished: This one I’m very fond of, so I don’t want to throw it away. (…) it was full of pallet-packed cocaine. Super cool. [Case information]. I thought it was so interesting, so I kept it with me. We took out the drugs of course. Sometimes I have things like that here. I just don’t have the heart to throw it away. The case has long since been closed, and he has been convicted and everything, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away. (CSI-11)
Their retention of the evidence this way, outside of storage, is explained as related to their own growth and learning: both investigators stated that they had used novel techniques during the investigations from which the evidence had originated. The sense of not having ‘the heart to throw it away’ further suggests that evidentiary objects function symbolically, beyond their initial intentions. Indeed, repurposed this way, evidence appears to function as ‘emotional items relating to memory’ (Sutton-Vane, 2020: 165) or ‘props’ that enable them to recall specific details about investigatory efforts. Retaining evidence without preserving its quality, however, renders the evidence unanalysable and unusable should the persons the evidence relates to appeal for a reopening of their case.
The increased recent awareness of past practices and methods for collecting, storing, and preserving evidence, in light of the recent reopening of several high-profile investigations described in earlier sections, have crystallised an awareness also amongst criminal justice actors more broadly about how their own current practices may look in an unknown, technologically different future, here described by a crime scene investigator: If a murder case from this year is reopened in 30 years, and someone comes and says “you examined this sweatshirt. Where did you put it? Are you absolutely certain that you were in that room? Are you certain that the victim's clothes were never in that room?” No, I can’t be 100% certain of that, and it makes me think, “I’ve examined things before, haven’t I? Was the room disinfected after he was there two years ago? Could his DNA still be in the room? Could I have transferred it with me?” I have thought about [an unresolved high-profile investigation in 1990s] where there was a sheriff's office and they probably put the evidence on their desks and then interrogated suspects by the same desk, and there's a lot of potential for mistakes. (CSI-9)
Ambitions for Justice Through Centralised Evidence Management
To combat the challenges described above, the new national long-term evidence storage facility is intended to store all evidence of serious crimes from across the country indefinitely (see Cederkvist, 2024a). The facility is located in the periphery of the capital city Oslo, and it is managed by staff who are employed by the police. Principles of security and integrity, or ‘notoriety’, are reflected in the design
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of the facility: Apart from and according to those who work there, no one is allowed to see or know exactly what exists within the facility. The building is itself intentionally designed to seem unremarkable from the outside, to shield both the evidence and the storage of it from view. Within the facility, the evidence is categorised, labelled, and stored so that it cannot easily be located in case of an intrusion. The storage workers state that they know “very little” about the cases connected to the evidence they receive and store. (Fieldnotes)
The contrast between past and future storage is dichotomic in terms of their reorientation towards risks and vulnerabilities. Organising evidence storage in the ways described above serves several functions: to organise – a contrast to local arbitrary storage – and to enable those who work there to keep the evidence safe from contamination, and possibly also to reassure the public that evidence is kept safe. When delivering evidence, local police district officers are not allowed into the rooms where evidence is stored, according to those who work there. The storage workers state that they unpack each box in a closed room in order to protect the evidence from contamination and degradation, and repack it in matching, one-size cardboard boxes. The boxes are stored on identical shelves inside the facility. This system of anonymising the evidence protects against intruders (who would not know which box is which), while workers are also kept from knowing which exact evidence is where. (Fieldnotes)
Interestingly, the workers claim that knowing as little as necessary, for instance about which evidence is located on which shelf, protects the evidence from harm and theft. Such security measures are intended to make the evidence inaccessible, echoing Schwartz and Cook's (2002: 1) phrasing of ‘secure vaults’: knowledge is reserved for a system that its employees can only access parts of – the parts that relate to oversight and monitoring of the facility itself: Much of their knowledge comes from the royal castle and national gallery, where other older items are preserved. Examples: different rooms for different temperatures and humidity. Automated systems monitor and adjust physical temperatures. Backup systems for electricity. Keycard systems unlock and log the opening of doors and movements of people. Databases that index evidence enable tracking its movements and activity. All of this is done to protect the evidence from harm. (Fieldnotes)
Technology for risk governance also dominates other areas of crime control and criminal justice (e.g. Aas, Gundhus and Lomell, 2009; Hannah-Moffat, 2018; Ugwudike, 2024). The distinct monitoring technologies of the state surveillance apparatus are here applied to monitor objects and mitigate risks associated with evidence, which is in tune with the needs of the Norwegian Criminal Cases Review Commission, who relies on detailed documentation of the movements of evidence over longer periods of time to decide whether past cases can be reopened, and evidence reanalysed (see Stridbeck and Brennen, 2023; see also McCartney and Shorter, 2023). In this context, where evidence is vulnerable to impressions of various kinds, human involvement is seen as risky, and that risk is mitigated by limiting both the workers’ and the local police's access to information about the contents of the facility. The storage facility itself is therefore enormously valuable both in terms of resources and content, as the police and justice department have invested in advanced technologies to prevent degradation, and, importantly, since it archives nearly the entire Norwegian material criminal history: Temperature errors, the wrong air pressure, and so on, is said to be as harmful as a break-in. The facility is “safe” but that will not matter “if a bomb drops on the roof” (quote). (Fieldnotes)
Evidence Management as Claims to Legitimate Government
For any event of the past to be (dis-)proven, the police and court rely on materials that attest to it and thereby materialise it (cf. Kruse, 2010, 2016). The transition to centralise evidence for long-term storage in Norway can therefore be examined from a perspective of documentality (Ferraris, 2007, 2017), where documents such as evidence are needed to facilitate the justice process and enable investigatory and legal actors to act on crime as a legal problem. In light of the empirical material analysed above and the documentality framework, it is useful to look back to the question posed by Schwartz and Cook (2002: 1), of ‘what have old, dusty archives, stored away in secure vaults, got to do with power?’. Since evidence embodies the narratives of crime and thereby also the access to potential truths about past events, the authority over the management of evidence is de facto an authority to manage both past, present, and future claims to justice. The major shift to centralisation in Norway can therefore be seen as a new culture of justice emerging from a shift in the state's documentality of evidence. The implications of a shifting documentality are intrinsically linked to the exercise of power over both local police, over objects, and over justice processes.
Decisions to define evidence of less serious crimes outside the scope of order and authority signifies a crucial aspect of the state's documentality of evidence – that the less serious crimes are seen as undeserving of remembrance through future justice processes. The ‘naturalized frameworks that determine the significance of what becomes archives’ (Schwartz and Cook, 2002: 3) are in this instance tied to whether investigations are determined serious or not, to the individual investigators’ capacity and decision to store, and to the resources afforded the centralised facility. Each of these frameworks shape potential futures (cf. Cook, 2007) and are reflective of how the state perceives of future risks and vulnerabilities. Separating the less serious from the more serious crimes is problematic as there is a risk that some people will receive different investigatory and preservatory quality and subsequently have less access to justice than others.
Another aspect of the state's documentality of evidence concerns order, which is achieved through centralisation rather than providing police stations with the necessary resources to achieve this locally. The local police officers and forensic scientists interviewed for this study expressed frustration over a lack of ability to deliver better evidence management: instead of ‘a professional system’, the forensic scientists had evidence freezers ‘all across the city’ (FS-4), and instead of an ‘actual storage room’ (CSI-9) the investigators operated in basements, garages, and other spaces unfit for the clean environment that forensic evidence needs. These were descriptions of a relative resource scarcity at odds with how evidence is treated in the new long-term storage facility, where subjecting all evidence to the same treatment within one hyper-controlled space appears to be intended to create what Campbell (2012: 261) describes as a ‘new transitional space’ of uniformity (see also Cook, 2013), where order in this instance replaces a decentralised and publicly criticised inadequate mess. When state actors such as the police decide what is archived and how, legal archives become sites of a discretionary power (Schwartz and Cook, 2002) where state authority is curated or produced (Stoler, 2002). Centralising evidence into a single confined space is as such a means to curate justice processes (see Elander and Hughes, 2024) as much as it reassures the public that the state indeed has the capacity to provide proper care of evidence, and by effect also of potential future justice processes.
Evidence management is indeed as political as it is practical (see Fonseca and Garrido, 2019). The backdrop to the transition towards centralisation in Norway concerned public complaints by the Office for the Auditor General of Norway and others that evidence had been destroyed or was unaccounted for. This criticism can be seen as political pressure for the state and the police to change practices for the rule of law to regain legitimacy. To achieve this aim, the state has implemented strict control practices, suggesting the state considers justice as a problem in need of physical response. Notably, the shifting culture of justice appears to occur without any significant legal intervention to regulate the preservation of these sensitive materials. In Norway, objects of evidence are collected by police officers, with few distinct methodological rules: according to the Police Regulation Chapter 10 Section 10-3, every police officer is obligated to investigate crime, and ‘as far as circumstances permit, other pieces of evidence in the vicinity of the crime scene be sought and secured or preserved securely by other means’. The Norwegian Criminal Procedure Act Chapter 16 Section 213 provides rules for seized evidence, and states that evidence can be stored after a conviction ‘as long as there is reason to anticipate that the case may be requested to be reopened or other special circumstances indicate this’. The wording of both laws leaves space for discretionary practices as neither mandates any definite consistency in the police's treatment nor preservation of evidence.
The Norwegian state's new measures to claim authority over the narratives of crime through a management of its objects, therefore, constitute an attempt at a break with past practices. This attempt only goes so far: since local police continues to manage evidence until trial and without supplementary resources, evidence will continue to be subject to the practices of the past prior to its arrival at the new long-term facility. Centralised evidence management does, as such, not resolve all of the issues that the police were criticised for and must instead be understood as foremost an attempt to reclaim integrity as well as authority over future justice processes.
A Break with the Past? Implications of a Shifting Culture of Justice
After an investigation or a trial, a new journey for evidence and justice begins, where the aim – under the rule of law – is to ensure that people involved with serious crime are given opportunities to request appeals and reanalysis. This article has shown how archives of crime are not only places for ‘dusty’ records to be ‘stored away’, but places for an active enforcement of authority over future justice processes and claims to legitimate government. It has also shown how crime scene investigators, forensic scientists, and storage personnel navigate and understand the concept of justice when it is tied to material objects. For those who manage these materials, evidence can function socially as symbolic reflections of good or bad work (see also Biber, 2018a), and the management of crime's archives can similarly function to reflect legitimate or illegitimate governance (see Brett, 2021).
In Norway, justice is now also approached as a problem for a future in which the value of crime objects is unknown and hypothetical. With this reorientation, the finality that characterises criminal justice processes – the very concept of ‘case closure’ – enters a state of impermanence. Freezing evidence in time indeed creates opportunities for a future transitional space (cf. Campbell, 2012) in which new meanings can emerge. Evidence archives can also act as Leane and Harkin (2021) describe, as ‘time bombs’ (see also Biber et al., 2021) that can reveal new information but also degrade over time – the effects of which can only be seen if evidence is reanalysed in the future.
The transition occurring in Norway creates an additional time-bomb scenario, however, crystallising as a paradox of centralisation. The Norwegian state's new system for evidence management introduces risks that were not encountered in the previous system while it also fails to address all of the vulnerabilities of the past. One such new risk is the compromise of its entire material legal history: the criminal archive is itself vulnerable to a force majeure which would put at risk every object in its place, exemplified by the personnel at the new facility as indeed ‘a bomb on the roof’. Meanwhile, a risk of the past that is not addressed by the new system is loss, contamination, and mishandling prior to arrival for long-term storage. Since the new facility offers claims to legitimate state authority through its design as a secure vault (cf. Schwartz and Cook, 2002), I suggest, it overshadows the vulnerabilities that remain in the police's system for evidence management. The new culture of evidence management embodies therefore an attempted break with the tradition for the criminal justice system to operate solely with events of the past, but only vaguely provides conditions that grant people whose evidence is managed by the police a greater opportunity for accessing justice.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank the reviewers for their wonderful feedback, and I am grateful to my colleagues Thomas Duke, Marina Hiller Foshaugen, Katja Franko, and Mareile Kaufmann, who have read drafts and discussed the core themes in this article on several occasions. I also thank Erlend Røyseth Riise for generously reading and commenting on the paper while on paternity leave, and Kristin Bergtora Sandvik for lending me her office space.
Additional Information
Not applicable.
Consent to Participate
Each police district, forensic laboratory, and the central storage facility visited for in project has confirmed and consented in writing, and every individual participant that is quoted consented either in writing or orally.
Consent for Publication
I confirm that I have obtained the necessary consent to publish the material collected in this study.
Data Availability Statement
Not applicable.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical Approval and Consent
Due to the sensitivity of the materials, the project received approval and guidance from the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research, which oversees research ethics, anonymisation, and the protection of data (reference number 302217).
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 947681).