Police in western Connecticut have a new weapon to help them fight crime using cellphones.

Westport police say through the new device they can extract from 8 million pages of data on a 32-gigabyte cellphone, saving hours of extra work, according to State’s Attorney Richard Colangelo.

"If we take too long, data and evidence can be destroyed or its retention period expires,” says Colangelo.

The technology, developed by Cellebrite, uses the basic concept of plugging a cellphone into an electronic handheld tool to analyze the data to specific needs such as text, photos or emails.

In the process, it helps law enforcement and attorneys track what was said during a crime, and find locations.

“The tool allows them to sort by date, by skin tone, by keyword searches,” says Westport Police Chief Foti Koskinas.

Local police departments are participating in a class in Westport this week to get a jump on mobile forensics.

"We can’t be San Bernardino. We can’t wait until something happens and then find a way. ‘How do we access phones? How do we do this? What are our legal rights? What are our tools to do it?’ We need to be ahead of technology," says Chief Koskinas.

Officials say departments can access the tools they need at a police lab in Weston.

The classes wrap up on Friday.