Body Worn Video: Body Worn Video has been rolled out across the Service during the Chief Constable’s tenure. Can the Chief Constable provide his views on the impact it is having on policing services, whether he believes it represents value for money and what, if any, issues remain unresolved.
The Police Service has successfully completed the roll out of a Body Worn Video (BWV) solution to the organisation, ensuring that we have been able to maximise the benefits of new technology in capturing best evidence and ensuring police accountability.
A Post Project Evaluation has been carried out and this has been shared with the Policing Board Performance Committee. This report highlights the key benefits from the use of BWV and some of these are:
- The provision of high quality and reliable evidence which supports and augments other evidential sources. And in volume terms, for the period of 18 May 2018 – 17 May 2019, PSNI created 37,280 BWV exhibits, illustrating the significant level of use.
- An analysis of 2017/18 cases shows that where BWV evidence was presented the conviction rate was 35.7% compared to 29.4% for cases without BWV evidence.
- The Lord Chief Justice has commented on how valuable BWV footage is in domestic violence cases and gives a helpful insight as it shows the distress of the victim, injuries, damage caused and the demeanour of children at the scene.
The Public Prosecution Service has further provided figures obtained following a significant manual trawl of cases between May 2017 and May 2019. 1359 cases were checked and for non BWV cases, the decision rate for summary prosecution was 38.53% and for BWV cases it was 42.68%, an increase of 4.15%
One matter that PSNI has identified was the inconsistency in usage of BWV across the Service. This was new technology and the introduction of BWV presented a significant operational change for officers. PSNI continue to examine ways to increase BWV use in a consistent and proportionate way; however there are signs that usage has increased steadily as officers become more familiar and confident in its use. To complement this, an improved corporate dashboard will shortly be introduced that shows the number of BWVs being booked out and the amount of video exhibits being generated through their use. This will inform District Commanders and Senior Management, assisting them with improving usage rates.
The capital costs of the BWV project have come in under budget, realising an underspend of £1,117k. This has been due to increased efficiencies, using existing infrastructures and a reduction in the number of cameras and attachments required.
Although the project has come in under budget, its primary purpose has always been to increase the quality of evidence gathered and contribute to increasing confidence in policing.
Indirectly it is still expected to contribute to efficiency savings through improving the quality of evidence gathered and in turn to encourage early guilty pleas and as a result, less court hearings.
Work continues to develop a technical solution for digitally sharing BWV material with Criminal Justice organisations. This will greatly reduce the work required to produce physical discs. We are happy to brief the Committee on any of these issues further and are finalising a more detailed response to questions raised by the Vice- Chair.