Police were struggling to protect domestic abuse victims – until this officer cracked the problem

What started as an idea in the back of a lecture theatre in 2019 could boost arrests by 50 per cent and help thousands

The screen shows a woman using her phone to give a tour of her hallway and living room, panning the camera around to show the fist-sized holes in furniture and walls where her husband’s punches landed.
The police officer on the other end of the call takes screen grabs to gather evidence of the violence, while asking for information on the welfare of the young children whose brightly coloured toys can be seen scattered throughout the family home.
Another woman shows an officer a bite mark left by her upper arm, where the black and purple bruising is again screen-shotted for proof of the injury.
They are distressing scenes, but just a handful of more than 6,000 domestic abuse calls handled by Kent Police to date are using new “Rapid Video Response” technology (RVR), which is now being rolled out across Britain and sparking the interest of countries including the US, Canada, Australia, France and India.
It allows domestic abuse victims who are not at immediate risk to select the option of having a video call with officers, rather than waiting hours or sometimes days for them to attend their homes.
The service is the brainchild of Stacey Rothwell, who joined the force as a constable in 1998, and is now in charge of technological innovation for policing across East of England.
When the Telegraph visits Kent Police’s headquarters near Maidstone, Rothwell is watching her invention being put to use by specialist officers. Separated from the bustling main control room by thick glass walls, they are engaged on video calls with victims every half an hour on average. Some will last minutes, others may go on for hours, with initial reports of a single incident often spiralling into disclosures of much wider abuse.
One domestic abuse victim reports that her former partner has broken a restraining order after being freed from prison. The man had threatened to harm the woman and her children, before turning up at her house and shouting through the letterbox, then harassing her with phone calls and threatening to kill himself.
“He sent me a photo of medication and told me he had taken an overdose,” she says. “Apparently somebody was messaging him telling him I’d had other men in my house and I was sleeping with them. Obviously I haven’t, I literally have no life. I spend my whole entire life looking after my kids, I don’t even leave the house.”
A formal trial of RVR conducted with the University of Cambridge showed that it cut the average response times for non-emergency domestic abuse calls from an average of 33 hours to just three minutes.
Arrest rates for suspects were 50 per cent higher for RVR calls than those dealt with under “business as unusual”, raising the chances of prosecution and ultimately, protection against repeated abuse.
Such improvements are badly needed. The most recent analysis of domestic abuse in England and Wales by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) concluded that it remains a “hidden crime”, and that although reports to police are rising they only represent a “partial picture of the actual level of domestic abuse experienced”.
Currently, just seven per cent of recorded domestic abuse offences result in a charge in England and Wales, with 53 per cent of cases closed under the marker “victim does not support action”.
By clicking through a link sent by text or email, which leaves no trace on mobile phones after use, people can speak to investigators one-to-one and show them evidence of the crimes they are reporting in real time, while getting safety advice and support such as social services referrals and food boxes.
Officers can only initiate calls with victims who are in a safe place and away from perpetrators, after a risk assessment is carried out to ensure they are not in immediate danger or a situation requiring an emergency response, and can understand and consent to the RVR process. Calls have so far been received from neighbours’ homes, cars, hospitals and even schools.
With their headset microphones and multiple screens, the officers’ role is very different to the one that greeted Rothwell when she started her policing career at the age of just 18.
“Within six months, I was on the streets of Dartford and I was dealing with domestic abuse incidents and some deaths and murders,” she recalls.
“I once arrested an attempted murderer for abusing his girlfriend, and I remember going into the hospital and she was quite disfigured facially. She was in fear for her life and very apprehensive about police involvement, but he was one of many.
“It’s a fairly frequent occurrence – it would be unlikely that you would do a night shift and not attend a domestic abuse incident.”
Rothwell says that when she arrived at some homes, it would quickly become obvious she was doing so many hours after victims had called the police.
“What’s frustrating as a frontline officer is knowing that there are these victims waiting for a service, but because there is a more urgent life-at-risk situation, you don’t get to those ones as quickly as you would like to,” she adds. “We would love to have got there sooner but we’re unable to, because calls are prioritised according to the risk. It’s a reality worldwide – this is a problem that is systemic in police response.”
Rothwell quickly moved up the ranks and off the streets of Dartford into specialist roles, before making the decision in 2015 to switch from being a police officer to a member of civilian staff on financial investigations.
But three years later, a job on a new “innovation task force” caught her eye, and Kent Police sent Rothwell to study for a criminology and policing masters’ degree at the University of Cambridge.
The mother of two was in the back of a lecture theatre in November 2019 when inspiration struck. “I just had an idea,” Rothwell says. “I was thinking how as police, we get in the car and we drive for an hour to get to someone’s house, and they might be in, or they might not. It’s really weird that we would drive to everything and that was essentially my concept… do we need to go to everything?”
The research Rothwell started as part of her degree culminated in the invention of RVR, which underwent its first testing for domestic abuse victims in Kent in 2021. An academic evaluation of the pilot found that as well as slashing response times, victims reported improved trust and confidence in the police.
The officers using RVR believe it increases the chance of domestic abuse victims coming forward, in the knowledge they do not have to risk the consequences of police being seen visiting their homes or attending a station themselves – actions which can fuel yet further abuse from violent and controlling partners.
Some victims who do make an initial report have decided they do not want to proceed by the time officers reach them in person, sometimes hours or days later.
“It’s giving victims a choice that they haven’t had in the past,” says Detective Chief Superintendent Emma Banks, the head of public protection at Kent Police. “We know that if there’s a delay in response to a victim, they may start to think things through, they’ll start to think about, you know, the impact on the children, the finances.
“But with RVR, the sooner you get to a victim and you’re able to provide advice and signpost them to support services, that enables them to make informed choices and allay some of those fears that start to creep in.”
Professor Paul Taylor, the national police chief scientific adviser, believes the technology has already had an impact on tens of thousands of lives. Many more will benefit in the future, he says, as RVR is increasingly adopted by forces around the country and beyond.
“It’s in over 20 forces, and it’s actually going internationally as well,” he adds. “It just shows that simple technology, well implemented, can have a dramatic impact on the service that policing is giving to the most vulnerable in society.”
As Rothwell points out, new ways of contacting police have rapidly evolved in recent years, but the way officers respond has remained the same.
“We’ve created many new ways of receiving calls for service – you can report it online, you can phone in, you can send an email,” she says. “There’s lots of different ways in which you can contact the police, but no new ways we’ve invented of responding to them. So we have more and more calls coming in to us, and only a finite number of officers to be able to service them. We’re always going to be struggling with trying to manage that demand and be effective.”
Still, Rothwell’s story offers a sense of hope that those in need can yet be better served – and protected – by officers around the country.
The National Police Chiefs’ Council says it is working to ensure that all forces in the UK “have the tools and support needed to embed RVR in their areas as part of a national, phased approach”, and some supporters believe such technology could eventually reach far beyond domestic abuse.
“If it works for domestic abuse, it will work with other crimes,” DCS Banks says. “There will always be a unique offer for domestic abuse victims, but broadening it out to wider crime types is an option.”