A distressing story from West Midlands UK about the loss of confidential intelligence on gang members. Without going into the details of this particular case because all the facts are not known, what we can safely say is that losing confidential material of this type should not happen. We are in the 21st Century and there are secure encrypted methods for keeping intelligence safely and a handwritten notebook is not one of them.

It is accepted officers need to have ready access to material while operationally deployed but given the security now available on phones having a handwritten note book begs the question as to why an electronic solution was not used.

Indeed given the amount of sensitive material police officers encounter on a daily basis it is disturbing to see that in 2020 many police services still issue their officers with the traditional black pocket book. Given the amount of data protection legislation there is and the potential for significant fines for breaches one wonders why agencies have not changed how they do business.

In recent years cloud storage has reached sufficient levels of security to meet and in some cases surpass the the needs of law enforcement and given the significant cost savings cloud storage can provide and the ease with which searches can be carried out for relevant data in a relatively short period of time most law enforcement agencies will have moved to electronic notebooks or be running the risk of incurring legal challenges.

One pocket book solution we can recommend is Verinote delivered by Verisaas It is well worth a look if your agency requires a user friendly and secure replacement for the traditional police notebook.