I had $10k of gear confiscated. Took them eight months to find nothing, then I had to go pick it up. This was in Australia.
Police forces are grossly under educated about anything related to computers and the internet, and ironically the people that suffer at their hands are the actual knowledgeable ones.
Are they? I think it's more of a policy issue. When I said phones are starting to be confiscated by default I didn't even mean tech crimes. Many incidents nowadays can be better investigated if you have access to messenger apps and social media - so it's quite tempting to just seize the phones and study them leisurely. If we don't want this as a default for any investigation, we probably need to make some noise about it.
Anecdotal aside: all my computer shit that was taken and they didn't confiscate my phone - and I'm thankful that was the case in terms of the ability to conduct day-to-day life, but it's also a bit confusing. I wasn't allowed to touch the phone (or any other of my tech gadgets) whilst under questioning during the raid, and I'm sure they spent some time either imaging it or looking its contents, but they didn't take it with them - nor any of my old phones.
It's confusing, because many of the 'cases' I read about in the news mention that the kind of content they're looking for is discovered on phones.
Maybe they figured the terabytes of data storage they did take (my NAS) would surely yield enough results.
Police forces are grossly under educated about anything related to computers and the internet, and ironically the people that suffer at their hands are the actual knowledgeable ones.