Trilateral joins 28 organisations across Europe who will develop a cutting-edge platform for providing practical support to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and practitioners in the fight against terrorism, organised crime and cybercrime, as part of the newly launched PREVISION project.
There is a common belief that new data analysis techniques will allow police to deploy a proactive approach and focus more on preventing crime and terrorism instead of responding to them. In several countries including the USA, UK, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, the use of technologies that analyse the current situation and predict where and when crimes and terrorist attacks will be committed is growing.
The mission of PREVISION is to empower LEAs’ analysts and investigators with tools and solutions not commercially available today, to handle and capitalize on the massive heterogeneous data streams that must be processed during complex crime investigations and threat risk assessments.
That being said, predictive policing poses major ethical and human rights challenges. Sceptics say that there is too little data showing that these approaches actually work to use them in real-life conditions. Moreover, critics point out that the use of historical and statistical data to predict the future carries a risk of stigmatization and discrimination of certain groups or individuals.
For this reason, Trilateral Research’s role will be crucial in ensuring that the new tools and solutions to empower LEAs’ analysts and investigators are ethically designed.
In fact, Trilateral Research’s role in PREVISION is to monitor the development and testing activities to ensure compliance with the relevant ethical and legal requirements, including human rights standards. Moreover, we will conduct an integrated privacy and ethical impact assessment in order to address the threat of misuse and negative impacts of the tools developed in the course of the project.
Officially launched on 4 September 2019, PREVISION is a research and innovation project funded under the EU Horizon 2020 Programme. The two-year project led by the Institute of Communication and Computer System brings together 28 partners, including 8 industrial and commercial partners, 7 research and academic partners, 3 non-profit organizations and 10 LEAs and practitioners.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 833115
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