Police Scotland 'failing to take fingerprints of thousands of people arrested', review finds

The Scottish Biometrics Commissioner today published (March 10) the findings of a joint review carried out to provide assurance that the ‘acquisition, retention, use and destruction of fingerprints for policing and criminal justice purposes in Scotland is lawful, effective and ethical’.

The review team observed that the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) Forensic Services has implemented all relevant recommendations from the Scottish Fingerprint Inquiry in 2011 and now provides a world leading forensic service to the criminal justice system in Scotland.

However, the team found that while Police Scotland is legally allowed to take the fingerprints of any adult it arrests, its policy is only to take prints once a person has been charged with a crime, so become ‘officially accused’.

Their report says this policy is at odds with policing practices in other parts of the UK and carries ‘significant risk’.

The review team also found that despite this policy, the fingerprints of many ‘officially accused’ adults are not being taken following their arrest.

During a three-month period, there were 3,202 instances where an ‘officially accused’ person was arrested by Police Scotland but did not have their prints taken.

The Scottish Biometrics Commissioner, Dr Brian Plastow, has called on Police Scotland to “significantly improve” its operational practices to ensure it follows its own fingerprint taking policy.

The Commissioner has also recommended that Police Scotland consider adopting a “take all” policy, which would mean it took fingerprints and custody images from all adults who have been arrested for any offence.

Dr Plastow said: “Fingerprinting an arrested person is a critical step in the criminal justice process, providing the police with strong physical evidence of identity that ties suspects to evidence and crime scenes.

“Not fingerprinting someone who has been arrested and brought into custody results in lost investigative opportunities, both now and in the future.

“It means Police Scotland can’t use its Livescan fingerprint technology to verify the person’s identity in real time, preventing misidentification and any attempts to defeat the ends of justice.

“It means the arrested person’s prints can’t be searched against unidentified crime scenes – in the UK or internationally.

“And it can also result in criminal justice inefficiencies, including where the arrested person subsequently becomes an ‘officially accused’ but cannot then be traced to acquire criminal justice samples including fingerprints.”

Fingerprints have been used in police investigations in Scotland and the UK for more than 120 years and are the most established form of biometric data.

In November 2025, Police Scotland held 831,014 fingerprint forms relating to 455,040 people on the UK law enforcement fingerprint database IDENT1.

It also held 1.1 million fingerprint forms ‘off database’ in a national collection of paper records including those from Scotland’s legacy forces.

The Commissioner’s report said the evidence gathered during their review suggested that over a 12-month period Police Scotland custody staff might be failing to fingerprint more than 12,000 people with ‘officially accused’ status – including those arrested for serious crimes and offences.

The Commissioner has stated this is “unacceptable and needs to change”.

Police Scotland policy states that even where an ‘officially accused’ person had been fingerprinted in the past, new prints should be taken ‘on every occasion’ to capture detail that may not have been visible or captured previously, for example, a scar.

The report also raised concerns that staff within Police Scotland’s Criminal Justice Services Division (CJSD) would sometimes ‘bulk-delete’ fingerprints before fingerprint identification staff had a chance to examine them.

The review team were told such deletions might be done to ‘reboot’ a Livescan terminal if it had stopped responding.

Dr Plastow said: “This is not authorised Police Scotland practice.

“If fingerprints are completely lost through unauthorised deletion, this may mean an investigation cannot progress, which could have a significant impact on a victim or on an accused person if the fingerprints could have cleared them.”

The report praised the recent creation of a Biometrics Oversight Board and a Head of Biometrics by Police Scotland.

Recording the ethnicity of anyone who had their fingerprints taken was also welcomed by the Commissioner, but the report said the data held by Police Scotland could not be compared reliably with ethnicity data from the Scottish Census as differing counting conventions had been used.

Dr Plastow said: “As a result, we were unable to empirically establish whether any protected characteristic groups are over-represented in police records.”

The report makes ten recommendations for improvement, including that the assistant chief constable with responsibility for CJSD should establish a structured system of controls to drive the changes needed in relation to Police Scotland failing to take the fingerprints of thousands of the people it arrests.

The report also recommended that Police Scotland’s CJSD should ensure an appropriate level of management presence is maintained at custody centres.

It said CJSD should develop a consistent training plan for Livescan operators and restrict administrative ‘deletion’ permissions to supervisory staff.

And it recommended that Police Scotland and the SPA Forensic Services should seek to digitise the paper records within the National Fingerprint Collection, conduct legality checks on each record and remove any forms not lawfully held.

The report also looked at future advances concerning the use of fingerprints and policing.

It said in England and Wales frontline police officers were using mobile fingerprint technology that allowed them to use smartphones to identify people in less than a minute – saving police time and resources.

It noted that at UK level, the Home Office has a biometric strategy, and had provided funding for biometric projects including the creation of a new National Centre for AI for England and Wales, 50 Live Facial Recognition vans, and a project that was helping speed up fingerprint processing.

Dr Plastow said: “By contrast, the Scottish government does not have a biometrics strategy for Scotland and accordingly there is no multi-year capital allocation to Police Scotland or the SPA to support a devolved vision where enhanced biometric capabilities could improve community safety in Scotland.

“Having such a strategy for Scotland would seem a sensible approach, not just to support policing but also in terms of Scotland’s network of public safety cameras and the opportunities to ensure their coordinated, lawful, ethical and effective use in supporting community safety – including targeting County Lines drug dealers and addressing the national emergency of male violence towards women and girls.”