The moment we built NDSP reporting into Hawk
A customer messaged us on a Tuesday morning. She'd been hit by an uninsured driver in central London, had dashcam footage from Hawk on her phone, and wanted to report it to the police. The problem? Police wanted a specific file format, a chain of evidence declaration, and her contact details bound together. She had to export the footage, fill out a form, email it twice, call to confirm. We watched her frustration play out across three messages. That's when we realised we'd built half the tool.
Why police evidence submission was broken
Most dashcam apps, whether phone-based or hardware, stop at recording. They'll give you a video file. Maybe they'll add GPS and timestamp data as an overlay. But when you need to report a crash or incident to police, you're left juggling multiple systems.
Police forces in the UK, particularly those using the National Dash-Cam Safety Portal, have specific requirements. They want integrity assurance (proof the footage hasn't been tampered with). They want metadata (speed, location, time, direction). They want your contact information pre-filled to avoid transcription errors. And they want it all bundled so it can't get lost between email, intake forms, and case databases.
We were getting emails from users asking if Hawk could help them submit reports directly. The answer at the time was no. And that felt wrong. We had all the pieces: evidence-grade hashing, GPS overlays, clip manifest. We were just making users do the final paperwork shuffle manually.
How NDSP submission actually works in Hawk
We launched NDSP police-report submission on iOS in a way that doesn't require you to think about it. When you've locked a clip in the Evidence Locker (biometric protected, SHA-256 hash verified), you see a 'Report to Police' button. Tap it.
Hawk opens a secure form pre-filled with your contact details, the incident date and time, vehicle registration, and a list of locked clips you can select. You add a brief incident description. You confirm the integrity declaration (basically, you're signing that the footage is unaltered). Then Hawk bundles the selected clips, the manifest with all hashes, your statement, and your contact details into a ZIP package and submits it directly to the NDSP intake system.
No email. No multiple uploads. No form filling on a separate website. The police receive everything in the format they need, with full chain-of-custody documentation baked in. For the person involved in an incident, the friction drops from fifteen minutes to maybe two.
Why this matters for evidence integrity
We're careful about this because it's not theoretical. If you submit footage to police and it ends up being used in court, the opposing side's solicitor will ask: 'How do we know this hasn't been edited? When was it recorded? Has anyone tampered with the file since recording?' Without integrity proof, even honest footage can become unreliable in a legal context.
Every clip in Hawk carries a SHA-256 hash, written at the moment of recording. It's not stored separately or calculated later. The hash is part of the proof. When you submit via NDSP, that hash travels with the footage in the manifest. If anyone tries to modify even one frame, the hash changes. The police and any court reviewing the case can mathematically verify the footage is exactly as it was recorded, down to the millisecond.
This is why we gate the feature behind the Evidence Locker. You lock a clip with your biometric (Face ID or fingerprint). That clip is now tagged as 'I am certain this is my evidence.' You can't accidentally submit something you didn't review. And the NDSP system receives clips with that declaration attached.
A small limitation, and why it matters
Right now, NDSP submission is iOS only. We launched it there first because the integration was ready and our iOS users asked for it first. Android will follow, but it's not trivial. The NDSP system itself has different connection requirements depending on device type and regional police force infrastructure. We'd rather launch it properly on Android than rush it and have users hit blockers mid-report.
If you're on Android, you can still export a dispute ZIP from Hawk (one tap, includes all metadata and manifest) and upload it manually to the NDSP portal. It's one extra step. But it's still faster than extracting raw footage and filling out paper forms.
The story behind the decision
We could have built this differently. We could have made it a premium feature, locked to Rideshare Pro or a higher tier. The business case was there. Police submissions aren't a daily-use thing; many drivers never need it. But our thinking was simpler than that. If you're reporting an incident, you're already stressed, possibly injured, dealing with insurance companies. Adding a paywall to the evidence submission process felt wrong. It felt like we were taxing justice.
So it's in Local Pro, which is £39.99 a year or £3.99 a month. The same tier that includes GPS overlays and continuous recording. It's not free (we have to manage infrastructure and liability), but it's not expensive. It's the cost of a coffee a month.
That customer from Tuesday morning eventually got her case sorted with our help. The police had her evidence within 24 hours. No follow-up calls needed. She sent us a screenshot of the closure email. That's the moment we knew we'd fixed the right problem.
If you've ever been in an incident and had to wrestle with evidence submission, does your current setup handle that handoff smoothly, or is it still paper and email?