When Police Scotland was formed from eight legacy forces on 1 April 2013, Scotland already had something few jurisdictions could claim: a single national forensic service, created in 2007 and run by the Scottish Police Authority, covering everything from crime scene to court.
That service was built to handle traditional forensics such as fingerprint and DNA analysis but few could have foreseen the exponential growth in digital evidence in recent years, which is only set to rise further with the advent of ubiquitous generative AI.
Stuart Houston, temporary deputy chief constable, who leads on crime and operational support for Police Scotland, summed up the change – and the challenge – at Futurescot’s Digital Justice & Policing conference yesterday in Glasgow: “A Nokia 3310, you can play Snake. An iPhone, you can take over the world.”
Digital evidence is also not like sending a DNA sample for analysis or a fingerprint for comparison. Data is inherently messy, often spread across several devices and cloud accounts, locked behind passwords, firewalls or encryption, and a single phone can hold vast quantities of it.
Thirteen years on, Houston’s task is to make digital forensics fit for a world where almost every crime leaves a data trail. At the event, at Strathclyde University’s Technology & Innovation Centre, he set out the work currently underway to move digital evidence through the system faster and more fairly which, he argued, would benefit everyone, not least the victims and witnesses whose long waits for their cases to come to court fuel public concern of a failing system.
Breaking down the silos
Getting digital evidence right is therefore critical to securing confidence in the justice system. The sheer volume of data from smartphones and cloud storage is creating bottlenecks and what Houston described as ‘severe’ problems for ingestion and analysis, impacting the entire evidential chain from police to, eventually, prosecutors in court.
And then there’s public trust, which takes time to earn, and can be lost quickly. Houston recalled the controversy over ‘cyber kiosks’, which saw one of his predecessors called before a Scottish Parliament committee to explain the force’s approach. Collaboration between analysts, senior investigating officers and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) is now, he said, “in a far different place”. Officers who remember collecting a pile of discs or a ‘pen drive’ from digital forensics, with little thought for data security, will recognise how far things have progressed, he added.
Late disclosure also remains a pressing issue. Delays in reporting digital evidence in an understandable format can lead to adjourned trials and first court hearings that lack the full evidence, with knock-on effects across the system. For Houston, the most important impact is on victims and witnesses. Taking someone’s phone can remove their main means of communication, often at the moment they need it most.
“Quite often, that is the lifeline of communication for that individual,” he said. The person may be dealing with the police for the first time, or suffering domestic abuse or another form of violence against women and girls. “My question really to all of us is: is that trauma-informed?”
Police Scotland is moving towards what he called ‘targeted extraction’, taking only the data that is needed when officers know what they are looking for. It has also begun using screen recordings to capture key material quickly. That can be passed to the prosecutor promptly, shared with the defence on the same basis, and allows the phone to be handed back far sooner.
Work is also underway to enhance cyber kiosks so local officers can select what they need more quickly. Houston stressed this must be done fairly, under the force’s ‘rights-based approach’, with nothing that could cast doubt on the evidence.
The force’s Digital Evidence Sharing Capability (DESC) finally went live last year after a lengthy cross-justice system procurement process, and a digital forensics data-sharing capability is in development, which Houston says will “revolutionise” how quickly evidence is shared.
Translating digital evidence into a format juries can easily understand is another area the force is working on. Over the past 18 months, it has introduced ‘streamlined reports’ to be shared with defence and prosecutors and is getting screen recordings into DESC faster. Without elaborating on a specific case, he recalled that when he took up his previous post overseeing organised crime and counter terrorism, the handling of digital evidence to COPFS was at a ‘critical point’.
Behind all of this is rising demand, driven, Houston said, by the growing threat and volume of crime with a digital dimension. With Police Scotland’s 2027/28 budget under discussion, he argued that much of the answer lies in investment in technology and process rather than more people.
That echoes a call in August from Malcolm Graham, chief executive of the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service, for around £62 million of investment over five years to reform criminal case management, redesign court processes and introduce modern digital case management. High Court indictments have tripled in three years, and the average time from police report to High Court verdict now stands at two years and four months.
A human hand on the decision
On AI, Houston sees clear gains in administrative work. Firearms licensing was an early candidate, given the large number of firearms holders in Scotland and the routine processing each application involves, though he stressed a human still makes the ‘final decision’. AI is also aiding internet investigation and intelligence gathering.
But he caveated that with recent scrutiny by a Westminster committee of AI’s use in police intelligence for a football match. West Midlands Police’s advice to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Aston Villa’s Europa League tie in November 2025 cited a match against West Ham that never happened, a fabrication later traced to a ‘hallucination’ by Microsoft Copilot. Chief constable Craig Guildford apologised to MPs for wrongly telling them AI had not been used, and later retired from the force. “You need to still have a decision maker at the end of it who is a human,” Houston said.
Criminals and the public are using AI too. Houston cited romance fraud, recent hoax bomb threats he described as AI-driven, and a surge in lengthy, AI-generated freedom of information and subject access requests that are adding to demand across the public sector.
Lessons from Miami
Houston’s insistence on human accountability is also the cornerstone of Miami’s approach, set out at the conference by Armando Aguilar, assistant chief of police for the criminal investigations division at Miami Police Department. Rather than write rules for each new technology, Miami has adopted a broad AI policy grounded in long-standing US constitutional principles on search, seizure and interrogation.
The policy separates “rights-impacting” uses, those that could lead to someone being arrested, detained or questioned, from administrative ones. An officer can use a public chatbot to design a flyer for a community event, but not to write a police report, Aguilar stated. And only agency-procured tools that meet FBI security standards for criminal justice information are permitted.
Every sworn officer has also completed a one-hour AI literacy session, built into annual recertification training, Aguilar said. To get officers engaged, he often opens with a light-hearted exercise, asking them to get ChatGPT to plan a dream holiday, before they try using it to write police reports to see where it goes wrong.
While it performed well for a simple burglary, the errors soon became apparent when officers asked it to handle more complex cases. Given a domestic incident involving three officers and several witnesses, it assumed the victim’s son was a child, and named the officer who detained the suspect as the one who arrested him.
AI, the policy states, should guide decisions but never drive them, and findings must be corroborated by other evidence. Access to facial recognition – a technology currently subject to a ‘national conversation’ in Scotland – is also restricted to around 12 people in a force of about 1,400 officers, with a case number required for every search. Arrest affidavits will soon carry a mandatory checkbox declaring whether AI helped draft the report or facial recognition helped identify a suspect. “You don’t want something like this coming out for the very first time in trial,” Aguilar said.
His starkest warning concerned licence plate readers, the US equivalent of Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras in the UK. In one case, a woman spent 13 days in jail after a reader picked up her number plate near the scene of a fatal hit-and-run, even though her car was undamaged and a different colour. Around 80 US officers have also been arrested for unlawfully accessing the databases, some to stalk current or former partners, in cases which have led to significant adverse media coverage and public backlash.
A National Policing Institute survey in September 2026 found almost 55 per cent of Americans now oppose police use of the technology. Yet support rises to 88 per cent for finding missing children, and around 58 per cent said proper guardrails would increase their support.
“The product is public safety, and the currency we deal in is trust,” he said. “Whenever that trust is broken, we risk going broke.”
From pockets of innovation to a connected system
Scotland already has solid foundations, according to a cross-justice sector panel that followed the morning keynotes. Garry Forsyth, chair of the Scottish Police Authority’s Policing Performance Committee, and the former chief constable of Bedfordshire Police, described DESC as “a game changer”, noting that it saved more than 125,000 hours in its first year of deployment. Summary case management is also helping to cut unnecessary trials and witness citations, while body-worn video is strengthening the evidence available to courts.
The next step, Forsyth argued, is to move “from pockets of digital innovation to a genuinely connected criminal justice system”, and that does not always need a new platform. He singled out warrants and citations, questioning why officers are still sent round with paper to knock on doors repeatedly. A joint report to his committee this year made more than 50 recommendations, many achievable with existing technology. Automated court scheduling, used elsewhere, could save thousands of unnecessary court attendances a year, he said.
Keith Dargie, chief digital officer at COPFS, said the public do not experience policing, prosecution and courts as separate organisations but as a single journey. Better use of AI and data, he argued, “is no longer a technology challenge; it’s a leadership challenge.”
Nigel Ironside, head of digital services at the Scottish Prison Service, described prisons as the “tail end Charlie” of the system, absorbing every gain in efficiency further up. He called for electronic warrants and for shared outcomes across agencies, observing that most of the people his service deals with are known to every partner. Funding, legacy systems, data-sharing rules and data sovereignty concerns all remain barriers, and the panel agreed legislation is struggling to keep pace.
Forsyth recalled a phrase from Frank Whiteley, who led the introduction of ANPR in the UK: “lawful audaciousness”, meaning finding bold ways forward while staying firmly within the law. “We can’t allow perfect to become the enemy of good,” he added.
Carolyn McLeod, chief executive of Victim Support Scotland, offered a counterweight. Digital tools will help connect services, but when someone contacts its helpline or live chat, a real person will be there. “Human connection cannot be replaced,” she said.
Fairness at the core
For Houston, every strand comes back to the right to a fair trial. That means fairness for victims waiting for their phones, for prosecutors working to tight timescales, for the defence seeking timely and equal access to evidence, and for the officers who spend hours downloading and ordering data for court.
The process of turning digital material into evidence can still be lengthy. But Houston was clear that better technology and closer collaboration with prosecution and defence “can only add to a fairer trial process.” As Miami’s experience shows, keeping public trust along the way may matter just as much.