Police Scotland Holds Moorov Guidance, But Refuses to Disclose It

The response from Police Scotland does not say there is no guidance. It says something more specific, and more significant than that.

When asked for internal guidance available to officers regarding the use of the Moorov doctrine when submitting reports to COPFS, and for any policies or training documents concerning cases involving multiple unconnected complainers, Police Scotland confirmed that the information is held. It then refused to provide it, relying on the law enforcement exemption under section 35(1)(a) and (b) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.

That distinction matters. The issue here is not the absence of guidance. It is that guidance exists, Police Scotland accepts that it exists, and the public is not permitted to see it.

The same response disclosed earlier versions of Police Scotland's domestic abuse Standard Operating Procedure. These documents set out the structure within which officers were expected to operate.

In Version 1.00 and Version 1.01 of the Domestic Abuse SOP, officers are instructed to conduct thorough investigations, pursue all available lines of enquiry and secure all available evidence. Within the list of evidential considerations, officers are directed to ask whether the perpetrator has victimised anyone else and to "consider Moorov".

The same documents state that a complaint from the victim is not necessary where there is sufficient corroborative evidence that a crime has been committed. They further state that where a victim makes no complaint, but sufficient evidence is otherwise available, police should take action, arrest the suspect and report the case to the Procurator Fiscal. They also require a Vulnerable Persons Database entry to be created even where there is insufficient evidence to substantiate a criminal offence.

That is the disclosed structure. Officers are directed towards a model in which investigations may continue without a complaint, records may still be created where no criminal offence is substantiated, and enquiries may extend to identifying other potential complainers, with Moorov expressly in view.

In Scotland, this structure carries particular weight. The requirement for corroboration means that evidence from separate sources must support each other. The Moorov doctrine allows that support to come from accounts of similar conduct involving different complainers. In domestic abuse cases, particularly those prosecuted as a course of conduct, that can make the way in which separate accounts are identified, obtained and preserved especially significant.

What remains hidden is the internal guidance that governs how that structure is applied in practice. If there is guidance on the use of Moorov and on investigations involving multiple unconnected complainers, as Police Scotland confirms there is, then the obvious question is what safeguards it contains. How are risks of suggestion managed? What prevents confirmation bias from shaping an investigation once multiple accounts are identified? How is the independence of separate testimonies preserved before they are later presented as mutually supportive? And what controls exist to prevent cross-contamination or alignment between accounts?

The FOI response answers none of those questions. It confirms only that relevant guidance exists and that it will not be released.

Police Scotland's reliance on the law enforcement exemption is not unusual. There is a legitimate concern that disclosing detailed investigative tactics could assist those seeking to evade justice. But that does not necessarily apply to high-level safeguards. General principles governing how independence between witnesses is preserved, or how contamination risks are managed, could be disclosed in anonymised or redacted form without undermining operational effectiveness.

The response also raises a separate issue about oversight. Police Scotland stated that internal audits, supervisory reviews and quality assurance findings relating to domestic abuse investigations are destroyed after five years under its Record Retention SOP. This means that much of the historical record of how such investigations were reviewed and supervised is no longer held.

It also refused, on cost grounds, to provide statistical information for Greater Glasgow Division over the period 2010 to 2020, including the number of investigations initiated without a complainer, the number referred to COPFS, and the number in which multiple unconnected complainers were used to establish sufficiency. Even at the level of basic measurement, the system says this information cannot be provided without excessive manual review.

Each of these gaps could be addressed without disclosing sensitive operational detail. Redacted guidance, longer retention of oversight material in serious cases, aggregated anonymised data on investigative routes, none would compromise operational effectiveness, but each would allow public scrutiny of how the process is protected.

This is not an argument that the use of Moorov is wrong in itself. Nor is it a claim that cases built in this way are unsafe. It is a narrower point than that, but still a serious one. A system that can explain how evidence may be assembled should also be able to show how the integrity of that process is protected.

Where that guidance exists but is withheld, where the audit trail is routinely lost, and where the figures cannot readily be produced, the balance shifts away from verifiable scrutiny and towards unverifiable assurance.

Source documents:
Police Scotland FOI 25-3686 response
Domestic Abuse PSoS SOP v1.00
Domestic Abuse PSoS SOP v1.01