Law Enforcement & Community Safeguarding
Safer communities
through innovative
research
We co-design technologies and policies alongside law enforcement and community safeguarding organisations to benefit society
Benefits
Supporting law enforcement
We work as a team with law-enforcement practitioners and technologists to address operational, technical, and ethical challenges
Optimising
Ethical AI
We enhance research and development so technologies are trustworthy, effective, and compliant
Enhancing practitioner processes
In collaboration with practitioners, we enhance processes to integrate ethical, privacy, investigative, and court-room requirements
Security
in society
We conduct research to understand diverse needs in society and how technologies can enhance public safety and security
Impact and Achievements
Getting stakeholder engagement in the law-enforcement sector right
In a recent research project we have created tangible impact for stakeholders in a complex and sensitive area such as law enforcement.
In this field, stakeholders often have complex relationships with each other. Our success is based on the ability to engage stakeholders in a constructive way. Recently, we have facilitated several multiple interactions to gain research insights and to improve cross-pollinations. Topics included ethical AI, online data collection, gender and AI, data protection, high-risk data processing, bias, transparency, and AI ethics
Network clustering
A recent achievement of our team is the successful development of a cluster of trusted stakeholders. Cluster participants can gain early access to our research projects, and provide feedback on our ongoing research. Our cluster is comprised of law enforcement officers, digital forensic experts, and researchers working alongside practitioners. Our cluster is an invaluable resource for informing our research aims and ensuring that our innovative work has operational and practical applications.
Learn more about our contribution in the CC-DRIVER project here.
Engaging with policy-makers
Due to our extensive experience in research projects, we are regularly invited to join events giving feedback to policy-makers, such as events run by the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs at the European Commission for research projects focussed on studying law enforcement technologies, and the Westminster Forum in the UK on digital literacy in the context of disinformation. In addition, we also provide inputs to policy-makers such as responding to calls for evidence from a parliamentary committee on rights to privacy in the digital age
Our research collaborations and service outputs provide actionable insights and are valuable tools for policymakers and decisionmakers working to tackle the technical, human and organisational drivers of crime. Our work directly and indirectly helps law enforcement agencies and other authorities investigate and prosecute crime and protect communities.
In a recent research project we have created tangible impact for stakeholders in a complex and sensitive area such as law enforcement.
In this field, stakeholders often have complex relationships with each other. Our success is based on the ability to engage stakeholders in a constructive way. Recently, we have facilitated several multiple interactions to gain research insights and to improve cross-pollinations. Topics included ethical AI, online data collection, gender and AI, data protection, high-risk data processing, bias, transparency, and AI ethics
A recent achievement of our team is the successful development of a cluster of trusted stakeholders. Cluster participants can gain early access to our research projects, and provide feedback on our ongoing research. Our cluster is comprised of law enforcement officers, digital forensic experts, and researchers working alongside practitioners. Our cluster is an invaluable resource for informing our research aims and ensuring that our innovative work has operational and practical applications.
Learn more about our contribution in the CC-DRIVER project here.
Due to our extensive experience in research projects, we are regularly invited to join events giving feedback to policy-makers, such as events run by the Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs at the European Commission for research projects focussed on studying law enforcement technologies, and the Westminster Forum in the UK on digital literacy in the context of disinformation. In addition, we also provide inputs to policy-makers such as responding to calls for evidence from a parliamentary committee on rights to privacy in the digital age
Our Services
We advise on enhancing technology design from the ethical, privacy, legal, and societal perspectives. We work alongside technologists and practitioners to develop technology design strategies to reduce risks of violating applicable standards and optimise compliance as far as possible.
We evaluate a range of issues relevant to technology research, development, and use. Depending on the project, we can analyse ethical, privacy, data protection, societal, socio-economic, legal, and human rights challenges. We do this in terms of the operational context of law enforcement and community safeguarding with awareness of court-room requirements.
We offer research on criminal justice, law enforcement, and community safeguarding. We can bring our extensive knowledge to issues and challenges faced by practitioners to learn about emerging phenomena and develop responses and solutions.
Recognising the risks associated with use of AI in law enforcement and community safeguarding, we develop training materials specific to the tools developed in research projects so that they can be used in compliance with applicable ethical, legal, and societal standards.
Tools that are researched with the intention of uncovering criminals and their networks can present a risk of misuse. We can tailor our Know Your Customer Exploitation Risk Assessment to your research and development project to understand risks of different actors having access to new and emerging technologies.
We keep up-to-date on relevant policy from the European Union, UK, US, and internationally. We offer policy analysis and provide advice and recommendations on policy compliance and harmonisation. We also work with stakeholders to develop new policies to tackle societal and organisational challenges.
Ahead of the EU’s forthcoming AI Regulation, and emerging AI regulation strategies in different countries, we work with our clients to help make technologies compliant with regulatory requirements, and ensure they are trustworthy and robust.
Building on our extensive experience with research ethics, we chair ethics boards that are internal to a research project, liaise with external ethics advisers and external ethics boards.
We provide advice on research ethics and data protection issues. We have provided useful and practical advice across a range of projects developing policing technologies. This includes advice on ethical and lawful use of highly-sensitive real closed case data in research, meeting standards of pseudonymisation and anonymisation, use of human participants, incidental findings, dual-use issues.
Featured from our Knowledge Library
Ethically developed technologies for safer societies – the ROXANNE project case study
Developing augmented reality tools to combat crime and terrorism
Ethical, legal and societal impact assessment in security research – the example of the PREVISION project
Testimonies from our partners
Dr. Ray Genoe
Director of the Centre for Cybersecurity and Cybcercrime Investigation, University College Dublin, INSPECTr Project Coordinator
There are many ethical challenges when coordinating a project that deals with Law Enforcement data and conducts research into the application of AI technologies for improving investigations. Navigating the legal, ethical and social issues that arise from such activities, requires an in depth understanding of the landscape and a good degree of technical knowledge. The team at Trilateral Research were an essential partner on the INSPECTr project and their dedication from the outset of the project helped make it a success. I would highly recommend considering them in future projects and look forward to working with them in the future.
Dr. Petr Motlicek
IDIAP, ROXANNE Project Coordinator
Without any doubt, Trilateral Research has been the most reliable partner in ROXANNE, and this has been valid from the beginning of the project. TRI well-coordinated the majority of the work related to ethical and legal challenges related to the R&D work on the project platform, collection of data, dissemination of sensitive material, plans on exploitation of project results, etc, and was often proactive to help with other aspects of the project which were found to be difficult to solve by other project partners.
GASS
Research group of UCM
We, the GASS research group, as the research group of UCM, would like to express our most sincere thanks to the entire Trilateral team with whom we have had the fortune to work on the last two European R&D projects. Trilateral Research is a true reference in everything concerning the ethical issues involved in using technology, especially in everything related to the ethical implications of artificial intelligence. That is why our congratulations go from here from these lines, and we hope we have new opportunities to collaborate with them in the future.
