Police Scotland implementation and use of the technology

BWV is currently used to a limited extent by Police Scotland, primarily in the North East of the country. Police Officers and Special Constables from the North East Division have used BWV since June 2010. This began with a pilot for the use of BWV in a designated area within legacy Grampian Police.

Police Scotland officer with BWV

The pilot showed that BWV offered significant business benefits including evidence gathering, enhanced prosecution evidence and use in the event of a complaint against the Police.  This resulted in greater uptake of BWV device use across the region. Today, there are just over 250 BWV devices in the North East.

Police Scotland are currently progressing a targeted roll-out of BWV to armed police officers before the COP26 conference that will take place in Glasgow in November 2021. Armed policing is an area of high risk; scrutiny and the roll out of BWV will help improve transparency and accountability.

Benefits of BWV in armed policing:

• Greater transparency of policing, in particular where armed officers are deployed to an incident
• Provides valuable evidence to assist police officers in the investigation of crime
• Supports victims by capturing evidence, providing a visual record of scenes, documenting injuries and showing the distress suffered by victims of crime,
• Provided the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service with high quality evidence to support investigations and prosecutions
• Supporting investigations by Police Scotland and the Police Investigations and Review Commissioner (PIRC) in respect of investigations concerning the policing response to a particular matter.

The use of BWV will not be a replacement for traditional policing techniques and Officers will continue to gather and record evidence by conventional means such as taking statements from members of the public or eyewitnesses.

The use of BWV is incident specific; unless they are part of a specific operation, officers won't be recording as part of normal patrolling.

Officers activate their cameras at the start of an incident or encounter, and under normal circumstances will continue to record until it's no longer 'proportionate or necessary'. Where practical, an officer will make people aware that that they are using the BWV device to record.