Police Scotland deletes more than 100,000 recorded public calls

About 115,000 recorded calls to Police Scotland’s non-emergency 101 line have been deleted due to a technical fault.

BBC Scotland News has learned the problem was discovered in February 2025.

It is understood a month’s worth of calls to the line were recorded and retained for four weeks but then not archived.

Police Scotland says the fault was quickly rectified and did not impact the ability to answer 101 calls or affect 999 emergency calls.

Police Scotland’s website says the 101 line should be used to contact police when reporting non-emergency incidents.

Examples of these include reporting stolen cars, suspected drug dealing or minor traffic collisions.

Calls to the 101 line are meant to be recorded and archived and can be used at a later date when dealing with complaints against the police, legal proceedings, or when a member of the public submits a request to access their data.

Although the call recordings were deleted, Police Scotland says information like the start and end time of the call, duration, the caller’s number and typed details of the discussion are still available.

According to Police Scotland figures, the 101 line received more than 100,000 calls every month between January 2024 and November 2024.

Supt Gordon Fotheringham said: “In February 2025, a technical fault was discovered on the archived 101 non-emergency call recording platform meaning a quantity of 101 call recordings were unable to be retrieved.

“The fault was quickly rectified and did not impact the ability to answer 101 calls. It did not affect the emergency 999 call line at any time.

“Upon further investigation, it was confirmed that while the archiving of the 101 calls did not take place, the call data was still available.

“A new recording system has since been implemented that mitigates the risk of any future technical faults and enhance resilience in our telephony structure.”