When Glasgow hosted the 26th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP26) climate summit, Police Scotland had to secure one of the largest and most complex events the country had ever seen. A paper-based search process was never going to keep up with that challenge. That pressure drove a GIS-driven mobile workflow that has since improved both defensive venue searching for major events and high‑risk missing person searches across Scotland.
Paper Stacks To Live Operational Data
Before COP26, specialist searches relied on dense paperwork and static maps. Officers generated forms in the office, carried them into the field, annotated printed maps, then brought everything back for someone to type up later.
“There was a lot of paper,” Gordon Tyler, GIS Lead, Police Scotland lamented. Different legacy forces used slightly different processes, but they all shared the same problems of slow feedback loops, limited mapping in the field and very little that happened in real time.
Smart devices were not part of routine search work. Some teams used GPS receivers, but GIS largely meant a desktop user printing out a map before deployment. That environment set the stage for a step change when COP26 arrived. And a key figure, Police Search Advisor Inspector Steve Hunter, played a key role in the digital changes to come. According to Tyler, Hunter had a long‑running passion for GIS, which began when he worked on the G8 Summit in Scotland in 2005 after getting hands‑on with Esri tools.
The COP26 Catalyst: The Various Use Cases
The 26th COP brought 104 heads of state, members of royal families, climate experts and activists to Glasgow, creating a security operation Scotland had never faced before. The main venue, the Scottish Events Campus, plus surrounding museums and public spaces formed an “island site” roughly two kilometers by one kilometer, ringed by a temporary security barrier that had to stay secure for the duration of the summit.
Scaling “Search And Seal” With GIS
One of the toughest problems was “search and seal.” Search and seal requires officers to inspect every asset with a void that could conceal a threat: drains, manhole covers, utility points, lighting cabinets and similar infrastructure. At COP26, that inventory translated into approximately 3,500 assets on the island site. More than 7,000 tamper‑evident seals, each with a unique ID, had to be attached, logged and then rechecked through maintenance cycles before and during the event.
“The scale of the demand meant that the previous process just would not work,” Tyler said. “It just could not be scaled to an event of this size.”
Hunter and the team surveyed the entire secure area with GPS and loaded the data into ArcGIS Online. They duplicated the survey data and attached attribution tables capturing search results and seal details for every asset. Simple digital forms then enabled non‑specialist teams from partner agencies to carry out routine checks, while specialist search officers focused on higher‑risk tasks and exception handling.
By shifting to this GIS‑enabled workflow, COP26 search and seal became a live, geospatially rich operation. Search managers could see which assets had been visited, which seals had been applied and which locations needed follow‑up, all in real time.
Defensive Venue Searching For VIP Protection
After COP26 validated the approach, Police Scotland extended the same pattern to defensive venue searching for buildings. Using ArcGIS Pro and Portal for ArcGIS, search teams imported floor plans, divided venues into discrete sectors and allocated those sectors to individual officers.
Once data was brought into ArcGIS Enterprise, dashboards provided an immediate, intuitive picture of progress for each search. This supported both one‑off VIP visits and locations that require routine searching such as royal residences and the Scottish Parliament.
“The speed of setup, the efficiency of that new process really came into its own last year,” Tyler noted, referring to short‑notice visits from the United States president and a separate visit from the vice president to unfamiliar locations. With a reusable GIS template, the team could configure a new building search quickly, reset it between operations and repeat the workflow as often as needed.
Building A National Missing Person Search Template
Defensive venue searching showed what was possible when specialist workflows, GIS and mobile devices came together. The logical next step was to reimagine missing person search management using the same principles.
Police Scotland receives more than 20,000 missing person reports each year, of which around 16,000 to 18,000 become recorded investigations. Specialist search teams only stand up when an individual is considered high risk to themselves or to the public. Those operations often involve partners such as the Coast Guard, mountain rescue, fire and rescue agencies and search‑and‑rescue dog units.
“Time is absolutely critical when individuals are deemed to be at high risk,” Tyler said. “And as always, that location and geography component is absolutely key to our search planning and prioritization.”
To support that planning, UK police use behavioural and statistical manuals that help predict likely locations based on a missing person’s characteristics and previous patterns. They are powerful but dense. “They are very information heavy and they can take time to interpret, but our police search advisors really have to have that information at their fingertips,” Tyler explained.
With the COP26 experience behind them, the GIS team knew they could turn this into something operational, visual and fast.
For missing person cases, Tyler and his team set out to give search advisors something they had never really had before: a digital starting point that appears the moment a new inquiry comes in. Instead of wrestling with blank forms and paper maps, advisors now open a ready‑made search “workspace” that already knows how to behave. With one click, it spins up a new case, pulls in the right layers and symbols, and instantly shares the same live map with officers in the field. “Simple on the front end,” Tyler joked, “but PhD‑level clever behind the scenes.”
From there, the system helps them move at the speed of the situation. It turns dense behavioral guidance and phone location data into clear search areas on the map. Within minutes a callout becomes a set of prioritized sectors that teams can actually walk. As officers work those areas, they mark progress, flag obstacles and record how confident they feel about each sweep. Every update flows back to the search manager in real time. This gives them a clear picture of where they have been, where they are going next and where precious time will matter most.
Real‑time Coordination, Office To Hillside
The new workflow fundamentally changes how search managers coordinate complex, multi‑agency operations. As officers update sectors in Field Maps, search managers see changes live in the dashboard back at the control room. They can re‑task teams, adjust priorities and brief senior officers who want to know how a search is progressing.
The dashboard also supports shift handovers and long‑running investigations. Managers can quickly identify low confidence areas, decide whether to send different resources and capture why a particular sector proved difficult to search. “The dashboard that sits alongside it has proved incredibly useful,” Tyler said, both for operational control and for communicating with leadership.
One of the most important benefits is the ability for a specialist to manage a search remotely in another part of the country, a significant advantage in a national service covering diverse terrain from dense urban cores to remote highlands and islands.
Data Integrity And Evidential Value
Search data is not just operational; it can become evidence. A missing person inquiry may lead to a murder investigation, a fatal accident inquiry or formal review of police decision‑making. That raises the stakes for records management and data integrity.
“The approach we have taken really gives us the required control over the information relating to individual inquiries,” Tyler noted. Keeping each case in its own hosted service, with clearly managed access and a full digital audit trail, protects the chain of evidence and gives investigators a detailed historical record of what was searched, when and by whom.
Measurable Benefits For Officers And Communities
Across both defensive venue searches and missing person operations, Police Scotland has witnessed a consistent set of benefits from its GIS‑based approach. Among these, Tyler highlighted:
- Major gains in efficiency and a steep reduction in paperwork
- True mobility for search teams carrying live maps instead of static printouts
- Real‑time situational awareness for search managers and senior officers
- Higher data quality, with mandatory fields and standardized symbology
- Improved management information and business intelligence drawn from search records
For agencies watching the unprecedented acceleration of public safety tech, Police Scotland’s experience shows how a focused GIS strategy can go from climate summit security to everyday safeguarding of vulnerable people, in just a few years.