Police display 1.67m licence photos a month but don’t proactively audit viewing

In brief

• Police systems displayed 1.67 million NZTA driver licence photos in July, most automatically when officers searched for a person.

• Police staff have a documented history of technology and database misuse, including unauthorised searches, unlawful photo retention and improper tracking.

• Audit logs record licence-photo viewing, but Police do not proactively review them and cannot say how many suspected misuse cases occurred.

Industrial-scale photo access, limited oversight

Police increasingly place more personal information and more powerful technology at officers’ fingertips. Their own history shows that some officers will misuse that access. So why, when Police systems are displaying almost 1.7 million driver licence photos a month, isn’t that access proactively monitored?

Figures released to Centrist under the Official Information Act show Police systems recorded 1,673,766 transactions resulting in an NZTA driver licence image being displayed during July.

Of those, about 1.43 million occurred through the OnDuty application and nearly a quarter of a million through the National Intelligence Application, or NIA.

OnDuty is a frontline mobile app used by officers to search people and access operational information while on duty. NIA is Police’s central database for information about people, incidents and investigations.

Around 1.24 million OnDuty licence photos appeared automatically as thumbnails when officers searched for a person. Another nearly 183,000 full-size images were manually requested.

Police cannot distinguish between a person search that happens to display a licence photograph and a search specifically intended to obtain the photograph. Nor can it say how many different New Zealanders those transactions represented.

A history of tech misuse

Improper access is not hypothetical. In 2024, the IPCA found one officer had made more than 38,500 database searches over 21 months, including thousands while off duty. Other cases have involved non-work searches, information shared with outsiders, and unauthorised access involving colleagues and acquaintances.

The misuse has extended beyond databases. During the 2021 Northland COVID lockdown, a detective falsely recorded a vehicle as stolen to trigger private number-plate tracking. A separate inquiry found Police had unlawfully taken and retained thousands of photographs.

More recently, the McSkimming review exposed further information-security gaps, while an Auckland constable pleaded guilty after using a Police-issued phone to covertly preserve disappearing intimate Snapchat images.

Logs exist, but Police do not proactively check them

Police told Centrist it does not proactively audit individual officers’ viewing of NZTA driver licence photographs in NIA or OnDuty.

The logs exist. They record when photographs have been viewed, but Police says they may be examined when an internal complaint or investigation gives it reason to look.

Police also do not separately record allegations involving driver licence photographs. It therefore cannot say how many suspected inappropriate-access cases occurred during the past 12 months.

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