Is Digital Evidence Management Prime for French Policing?
It might just be an innovation whose time has come in France.
France has a strong tradition of using surveillance for policing and public safety. Even the word surveillance is steeped in French history. Today, it’s commonly used to refer to CCTV cameras, which are estimated to number in the hundreds of millions around the world. But before this technology even existed, the word surveillance was part of the French vernacular. According to Merriam-Webster, the word surveillance comes from the French word 'surveiller’ which dates back to the French Revolution. And the national ties to surveillance are stronger still, with France’s Nicephore Niepce widely acknowledged as the father of camera photography.
But there’s more to the connection than a word. In recent years, France has made investments and commitments to new surveillance technologies that have gone a long way toward keeping French citizens safe. For example, in 2007, the Interministerial Crime Prevention Fund (FIPD) was created, in part, to assist organisations and individual homeowners in their quest to secure and deploy video surveillance devices. Additionally, in 2021, the French Ministry of the Interior announced plans to introduce body-worn video across the National Police and Gendarmerie. And more recently, in 2023, the French Assemblée Nationale and the Senate authorised the use of AI-driven surveillance ahead of the Paris Olympics.
As a result of these and other actions, the rise in the number of devices capable of capturing video evidence has grown exponentially. Contributing to this upward trend, commercial CCTV systems have become more affordable, and dashcams and video doorbells have become more ubiquitous with the masses as well.
All of this is happening against a backdrop of ongoing public debate on whether or not, and how, such surveillance devices adhere to France's stringent privacy laws. Video recording is tightly regulated in France, with the CNIL (Commission Nationale Informatique & Libertés) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) setting out clear mandates for data protection and privacy.
Beyond surveillance devices, an uptick in smartphones is also driving exponential growth in digital evidence, with everyday citizens helping to thwart crime by capturing and sharing photos and videos. In France, smartphone adoption is expected to reach 56.89 million by 2029, an impressive number given that the current population of France is estimated to be just slightly higher, at around 68 million.
For magistrates (juges d'instruction) and judicial police, all of these growing sources of digital evidence are a double-edged sword. They are an important source of clues for case-building and crime-solving. But there’s a downside too.
As many of the 150,000 officers who serve in the Police nationale, National Gendarmerie, Police Municipale or the National de Police Scientifique (SNPS) could relate from personal experience, collecting, analysing and sharing digital evidence is time-consuming and manual. For example, officers waste countless hours travelling back and forth to crime scenes to secure video footage, only to find out upon returning to the station that it’s often not even playable.
And difficulties securing digital evidence aren’t just limited to CCTV video. Officers often cite issues with obtaining emergency (17) call recordings from force control rooms, and securing body-worn camera footage as well.
All of this is happening in environments where policing resources are already stretched to the limit. Across France, police investigators’ desks are covered in stacks of paper, DVDs and USBs, from growing backlogs of cases waiting to be investigated.
In recent years, there has been some progress made in digitising and streamlining evidence sharing between police and magistrates. The Ministry of Justice also initiated a program designed to digitalise processes involving the magistrate and the court. In spite of this, however, it’s still common practice for officers to make physical copies of digital evidence and then courier that evidence over to the magistrate’s office.
But this is starting to change. By taking advantage of new technology for digital transformation, growing numbers of police forces and justice system partners in Europe (and around the world), are now adopting cloud-based Digital Evidence Management systems (DEMs), to streamline their collection, analysis and sharing of digital evidence.
The availability of a secure government cloud for managing and storing digital evidence is another factor driving this digital transformation. In January 2024. Capgemini and Orange announced a joint venture to offer a Microsoft-focused sovereign cloud. “Bleu” (as it’s called) offers sovereign cloud services to French organisations, leveraging Microsoft cloud technology deployed in data centres operated by Capgemini and Orange.
Deploying Digital Evidence Management solutions, like NICE Investigate and NICE Justice, in this secure cloud environment will benefit both police agencies and magistrates. Police will be able to automate their intake of all types of digital evidence, and electronically share that same digital evidence with magistrates, through a seamless end-to-end process and unified system that also strengthens chain of custody and complies with data protection rules.
France boasts a well-documented history of embracing technological innovation, in fields as wide ranging as medicines and computing. Digital transformation of evidence management may well just be the next front.
