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As the volume of video and audio evidence grows, Pimloc’s Secure Redact platform is helping UK police forces automate redaction, accelerate investigations and maintain compliance, while boosting public trust through privacy-first technology. At The Emergency Tech Show, visitors can see new capabilities in action at Pimloc's stand in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion.

We were excited to hear about the company's work with police forces, and asked the team about how their time-saving technology works.

1. How does Pimloc’s redaction technology ensure compliance with privacy laws while still enabling fast access to critical video evidence?

As video and audio evidence grows, police investigations face overwhelming data processing challenges. From managing digital evidence, maintaining privacy of personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data captured in audio-visual files, to ensuring digital evidence is usable and secure - all these tasks become increasingly more time-consuming.

Pimloc’s Secure Redact Platform transforms how UK police forces manage digital evidence compliance, by providing the privacy layer for mass-scale audio and video management, which directly impacts force efficiency, improves victim outcomes and supports trust and confidence in UK Policing.

Secure Redact’s unrivalled accuracy in automatically redacting PII from vast volumes of video and audio, from faces and licence plates to sensitive spoken information, enables forces to meet stringent UK GDPR, DPA 2018, FOIA, and SAR compliance demands with unprecedented speed. This allows for secure and quick sharing of video and audio evidence with Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the media and the general public. 

By automating the arduous task of redaction, Pimloc’s technology frees up valuable officer time while guaranteeing the integrity and secure handling of digital evidence, ultimately fostering greater public confidence in how police data is managed and shared.

2. What role does Secure Redact play in helping police forces build and maintain public trust when using video and audio data?

Secure Redact plays a crucial role in empowering police forces to build and maintain public trust by striking the essential balance between transparency and privacy in their use of video and audio data.

With Secure Redact, forces can confidently protect the privacy of individuals not directly involved in an incident. Secure Redact brings together world-leading automation with powerful end-user tools to ensure human oversight and control. Secure Redact's intuitive application tools are designed to facilitate this, enabling documented human review and precise redaction of video and audio.

This ensures content can be redacted to the required quality, regardless of how it was captured or any specific contextual requirements that are needed to be met for a case. For instance, unredacting a specific individual while keeping others blurred is a simple, one-click operation, allowing for quick, accurate, and context-specific sharing.

By facilitating the responsible, efficient, and transparent management of multimodal data, Secure Redact demonstrably strengthens police forces' commitment to both public safety and individual rights, fostering invaluable public trust.

3. How is Pimloc’s AI platform improving the speed and accuracy of video analysis for policing tasks like licence plate recognition and suspect identification?

The volume of captured video and audio footage police forces must review and manage continues to grow. This task now requires a multifaceted approach to address the mandatory redaction of PII, the time-consuming process of reviewing video and audio evidence, ensuring a clear chain of custody for any privacy-based redaction, and efficiently managing these tasks across multiple teams, workflows and file formats.

Pimloc’s Secure Redact is designed to handle these four key use cases, and tackle them through one, privacy and intelligence platform.

Secure Redact has over 99% accuracy of detection for redaction of faces, license plates, screens, PII in audio and soon-to-be scene text in video (such as house numbers and police badges). Combined with our user-friendly and intuitive editing and review tools, this means that a 10 minute long CCTV video can take just 10 minutes to redact with our platform.

Our enhanced chain of custody capabilities provide a secure, automatically-generated audit trail of any edits to your multimedia file, for processing, redacting, storing and sharing of sensitive video and audio with the CPS, other third parties and the public.

Meanwhile, our new Video Search capabilities accelerate evidence investigation, by allowing intelligent search and discovery through large volumes of images, video and audio using natural language queries, such as “find the person wearing a black cap”.

Easily integrated into DEMS or VMS platforms, or deployed as a standalone solution, Secure Redact’s combined capabilities mean you can:

• Speed up operational efficiency for redaction teams
• Free up valuable office time to focus on other critical projects
• Deliver trust and confidence by responsibly managing video for proactive community engagement
• Keep operations data compliant and quickly respond to evidence presentation to CPS, FOIA requests and media alerts

Pimloc’s partnership with Microsoft also means forces can access Secure Redact via their Microsoft private tenant, for seamless integration into your current workflow and better data security.

4. Can you tell us more about the Video Search pilots that multiple UK police forces are currently in the process of?

Video Search accelerates investigations across critical use cases - from supporting murder or serious crime investigations and major sports incidents to building retail theft evidence. By quickly locating areas of activity across vast volumes of already captured video, it dramatically speeds up search processes and streamlines operational evidence building, while prioritising privacy. 

Current projects with UK police forces have included hundreds of hours of video from recent civil unrest - instead of taking multiple days, if not weeks, to manually review and search through these videos, Secure Redact enabled the search process to be sped up to a matter of seconds (once videos are uploaded), allowing more video evidence to be reviewed in a timely manner.

5. What future capabilities are you developing to further support frontline police work and digital evidence management?

We are focused on advanced capabilities that streamline the entire workflow - from initial review to secure evidence sharing. Our core focus is on creating a one-stop privacy platform - a truly comprehensive, unified solution for managing all forms of sensitive digital evidence. We are moving beyond just a redaction tool to a solution that fundamentally transforms how police forces and digital evidence managers work.

Our upcoming capabilities are centred on two key areas:

Our new Video Search addresses the overwhelming challenge of finding specific nominals in vast volumes of footage. Whether from CCTV, bodycams, or citizen submissions - Video Search dramatically reduces the time spent on manual review. This accelerates the evidence-building process, allowing investigators to focus on actionable insights and move cases forward faster.

Our automated scene-text redaction will automatically detect and redact sensitive text that appears within video footage. For example, it can recognise and blur text from video recordings of mobile phones, logos on vehicles and clothes, house numbers, signs and more. This capability is crucial for ensuring comprehensive privacy protection and compliance, as it addresses a common source of sensitive data that is often missed by traditional redaction methods.

6. What can visitors expect to see from Pimloc at the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at ETS?

Visitors can expect to see our new features, including Video Search, Chain of Custody and scene text redaction in action. Learn first-hand from the Pimloc team about how multiple UK forces are using the Secure Redact Platform, including benefits, results and integration questions.