Digital Evidence Management Systems in the UK: Top Systems and Buyer's Guide

With advancements in modern technology worldwide, it's no surprise that the UK embraces advanced solutions to enhance workflow processes and improve people's lives. As crime shifts to the digital realm, so does the evidence.

This underscores the urgency for UK law enforcement to adopt digital solutions to combat crime and uphold justice. A Digital Evidence Management System (DEMS) is one rapidly growing solution that is slowly but surely gaining prominence.

A report by Global Market Insights estimates that the Digital Evidence Market, valued at USD 7 billion, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10% from 2023 to 2032.

That growth follows the volume of material police forces now handle. A single investigation can draw on body-worn video, third-party CCTV, 999 call audio, interview recordings, mobile phone downloads, photos and footage sent in by the public, in dozens of file formats. Kept on discs, shared drives and individual laptops, that material is slow to find, hard to disclose, and difficult to account for when the defense asks who handled it. A DEMS brings it into one secure, searchable repository with a record of every action taken on it.

It is also a regulated purchase. Personal data processed for law enforcement purposes falls under Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018, and how evidence is handled, retained and disclosed is tested against the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) and the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 (CPIA). This guide compares the systems available in the UK, sets out what to look for, and explains what UK law requires of the platform. For a broader introduction, see our digital evidence management guide.

What are the Top Digital Evidence Management Systems in The UK?

The top Digital Evidence Management systems are rapidly gaining popularity in the UK.

Here is how the leading UK Digital Evidence Management systems compare:

1. VIDIZMO Digital Evidence Management System (DEMS)

VIDIZMO was named a Major Player in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Digital Evidence Management Solutions for Law Enforcement 2020.

VIDIZMO DEMS lets agencies ingest, store, manage, analyze, and share digital evidence in a single, centralized repository. Its custody trail, access controls, redaction and retention rules support the obligations UK forces carry under the Data Protection Act 2018, UK GDPR and PACE, which are covered in the section on UK law below.

It caters to law enforcement agencies, legal entities, and commercial security providers.

VIDIZMO DEMS is gaining the recognition it deserves for its advanced evidence management features in the market, such as:

• Tamper Detection
• Chain of Custody Reporting
• Per-recipient sharing links that expire by date or number of views
• AI-powered automatic transcription in 82 benchmarked languages, with translation of audio, video and documents
• AI-enabled search within video through OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
• AI-generated tags and metadata search capabilities
• AI-powered Redactor
• Security features such as Role-Based Access Control and Encryption.

Explore its full features here.

Deployment is the force's choice: shared or dedicated SaaS operated by VIDIZMO, a private cloud in the force's own cloud subscription, on-premises in its own data center, or air-gapped with no internet connection. In an air-gapped deployment, transcription, object detection, OCR and PII detection run on local models, so evidence does not leave the force's network for AI processing. A hybrid model connects a cloud deployment to directories and storage that stay on premises.

The diversity of deployment options and its advanced AI capabilities give it a competitive advantage over other DEMS providers.

2. NICE Evidencentral

NICE, a software company headquartered in Israel, offers Evidencentral, a cloud-based digital evidence platform for public safety and justice. It brings together NICE Inform for emergency communications recording, NICE Investigate for police investigations and digital evidence, and NICE Justice for prosecution and courts. Police forces in England and Wales use NICE Investigate to collect and share digital evidence.

Here are some of its key features:

• Video and Audio Transcription
• Face Detection and Redaction
• Universal Text Search
• Evidence Connections

NICE Evidencentral is strongest in emergency communications, where NICE Inform records emergency calls and radio traffic, and also serves law enforcement and legal users.

3. EvidenceWorks

EvidenceWorks is NEC Software Solutions' digital evidence management product for UK criminal justice agencies, and it is in use with UK police forces.

It brings interview recordings, body-worn video, crime scene images and other digital files for a crime or incident into one secure repository, where investigators can catalogue, analyze and share them.

Its main features include:

• Integration with police records management systems and other existing police systems
• Ingestion from force-controlled sources, such as interview recorders and body-worn video, and from uncontrolled sources such as third-party CCTV and the public
• Workflow management, search, retrieval and sharing
• Access, security and activity auditing

4. FotoWare DEMS

FotoWare offers a Digital Evidence Management System (DEMS) that holds evidence of any type in one searchable repository, with automated metadata, workflows, and chain-of-custody logging from ingestion to court. FotoWare states that more than 80% of UK police forces use its software to manage digital evidence.

Its mobile app lets officers capture and upload evidence at the scene and reach it from their smartphones.

Their key features include:

• Annotations
• Metadata Search
• Video Playback
• Redaction
• Granular access control
• Integration through an open API
• Cloud or on-premises deployment

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Digital Evidence Management System in the UK

Take the following Digital Evidence Management System's features into consideration when choosing a DEMS for your agency:

• Chain of Custody: Every view, download, edit, clip and share should be recorded automatically with the user, the date and time, and the action, from ingestion to disposal. The trail should export as a report a court can read, and a hash recorded at ingest should show that a file has not changed since it entered the system. See our guide to chain of custody for digital evidence.
• Controlled Sharing: Evidence goes to the Crown Prosecution Service, defense solicitors, partner forces and courts. Each recipient should get their own link that expires by date or number of views, so you can show who opened what and when, without sending discs or email attachments.
• Redaction: Personal data of people who are not relevant to a case, such as bystanders' faces, number plates, addresses and phone numbers, often has to be removed before material is shared outside the investigation or released. Automatic detection followed by human review is faster than redacting audio, video and documents by hand, and the review step catches what detection misses.
• Security: Ensure the system provides robust security measures, including access control and encryption, to protect sensitive digital evidence.
• Compatibility: Verify that the DEMS can seamlessly integrate with existing software and hardware used by your agency.
• Compliance: The system should support your obligations under Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018, UK GDPR, PACE and CPIA, covered in the next section. Ask suppliers for independent evidence, such as ISO/IEC 27001 certification, rather than accepting a general claim of compliance.
• Scalability: Choose a system that can grow with your agency's needs, accommodating increased data storage and processing requirements.
• User-Friendliness: opt for a system with an intuitive user interface to facilitate easy adoption and efficient use.
• AI (Artificial Intelligence) Capabilities: Look for search inside the evidence as well as its metadata: automatic transcription of speech, text read from video frames and documents, and AI-generated tags, so an investigator can find the relevant minute of footage without watching hours of it.
• Deployment Options: Consider systems that offer SaaS, private cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployment, so the most sensitive material can stay on infrastructure your force controls while less sensitive work runs in the cloud.

What UK Law Requires of a Digital Evidence Management System

No UK law certifies a DEMS. The laws and codes below place duties on the force as controller and investigator, and the system either makes those duties straightforward to meet or leaves staff to meet them by hand.

• Data Protection Act 2018, Part 3: Personal data processed for law enforcement purposes is governed by Part 3 of the Act and its six data protection principles, with the College of Policing's Authorised Professional Practice on data protection as operational guidance. Section 62 requires logs of collection, alteration, consultation, disclosure, combination and erasure in automated systems. Logs of consultation and disclosure must show the date and time and, as far as possible, who consulted or disclosed the data and, for a disclosure, who received it. The logs may be used to verify that processing was lawful, for self-monitoring and disciplinary proceedings, to protect the data, and in criminal proceedings.
• UK GDPR: Processing that is not for law enforcement purposes, such as staff records, falls under UK GDPR and Part 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018, as does evidence held by businesses and other organizations that are not competent authorities.
• Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE): Under section 78, a court can refuse to admit prosecution evidence if, given all the circumstances including how it was obtained, admitting it would make the proceedings unfair. Separately, gaps in the record of how evidence was handled after collection invite challenges to its integrity. The PACE Codes of Practice set out how police search premises and seize property, detain and question suspects, record interviews and make arrests, and under section 67(11) a court takes any relevant code provision into account when deciding a question in the proceedings, including whether to exclude evidence under section 78.
• PACE Code B (Searching Premises and Seizing Property): An officer can require information held electronically and accessible from the premises to be produced in a form that can be taken away and is visible and legible, or can readily be made so. Under section 22, anything seized may be kept only as long as necessary, and not for use as evidence or for forensic examination if a photograph or copy would be sufficient. On request, the person who had the property before it was seized must be given a list or description of what was retained, and supervised access to it or a copy, unless an exception applies, such as a risk of prejudicing an investigation or proceedings. The grounds for refusing access must be recorded. The system has to tie each item to the seizure it came from, show that a copy has not changed since it was ingested, and produce lists and copies on request.
• PACE Codes E and F (Audio and Visual Recording of Interviews): Interviews recorded on a secure digital network are transferred to a remote secure file server, which Code E says may use cloud-based storage, and are stored in read-only form to protect their integrity. Access to the recordings, including copying, must be strictly controlled and monitored, so that only people given specific permission for a specified purpose can reach them: for example, officers and Crown Prosecution Service lawyers preparing the case, and a suspect who has been charged or told they may be prosecuted, with their legal representative. Where an interviewer's identity is withheld because disclosing it could put them in danger, Code F allows anything in the visual recording that could identify them to be concealed before the suspect is given access. The system holding the recordings has to restrict each one to the people working on the case, record who played or copied it, and keep the original intact when an edited copy is released.
• Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 (CPIA): Under the Act and its Code of Practice, investigators must record and retain material relevant to an investigation and reveal it to the prosecutor, who discloses to the defense any material that might reasonably be considered capable of undermining the prosecution case or assisting the case for the accused. The system has to keep that material, find it again quickly, and show what was disclosed and when. See our guide to evidence disclosure.
• Code of Practice on Police Information and Records Management: Issued by the College of Policing in 2023 under the Police Act 1996, the code replaced the Management of Police Information (MoPI) code. It requires forces to review information periodically so it is kept no longer than its policing purpose requires, to dispose of it by transfer to an archive or secure destruction, and to consider automating review, retention and disposal.

In practice, a system built for UK policing should encrypt evidence in transit and at rest, restrict access by role, keep a custody trail that shows whether it has been altered, apply retention and disposal rules automatically, hold evidence back from disposal while a case needs it, and redact personal data before release.

VIDIZMO DEMS records every action taken on an evidence item in the platform with the user, email address, IP address, date and time, and seals its audit records with SHA-384 so any later alteration is detectable. Tamper detection, when switched on for the portal, verifies on demand that a file has not changed since its SHA-384 hash was recorded at ingest. Per-recipient sharing links attribute each opening of shared evidence to a named recipient. Access can be granted per item to named users or groups for a set period, users can be required to give a reason before opening an item, and the reason is recorded in the custody trail. Supervisors can subscribe to alerts when evidence flagged as sensitive, such as an interview recording, is viewed, played, downloaded, copied or clipped. By default, redaction saves the redacted version as a separate file and keeps the original unchanged. The custody trail exports as a PDF report or CSV filtered by date, event, user or IP address, for a court, an internal evidence audit or an inspection. Retention policies can run continuously, and a legal hold overrides them for evidence tied to an active case. VIDIZMO LLC is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified (certificate RA-2507091).

Request a Free Trial of VIDIZMO DEMS

Effective evidence management becomes crucial for law enforcement and justice as digital evidence grows in volume and diversity.

When selecting a DEMS in the UK, prioritize chain of custody, controlled sharing, redaction, security, deployment options, and support for your data protection and disclosure obligations.

VIDIZMO DEMS combines these with AI search and a choice of SaaS, private cloud, on-premises, hybrid and air-gapped deployment.

To see how it handles your own evidence, request a free DEMS trial.

Contact us to discuss your evidence management requirements.