ALIGNER aims to bring together European actors concerned with Artificial Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and Policing to collectively identify and discuss needs for paving the way for a more secure Europe in which Artificial Intelligence supports LEAs while simultaneously empowering, benefit-ing, and protecting the public. To achieve this, ALIGNER will (1) Facilitate communication and cooperation between actors from law enforcement, policing, policy-making, research, industry, and civil society about the changing dynamics of crime patterns relevant to the use of AI by establishing a workshop series; (2) Identify the capability enhancement needs of European LEAs; (3) Identify, assess, and validate AI technologies with potential for LEA capability enhancement by implementing a technology watch process that includes impact and risk assessments; (4) Identify ethical, societal, and legal implications of the use of AI in law enforcement; (5) Identify means and methods for preventing the criminal use of AI via the development of a taxonomy of AI-supported crime; (6) Identify policy and research needs related to the use of AI in law enforcement by mapping practitioner needs and emerging crime patterns with identified AI technologies; and (7) Employ the gathered insights in order to incrementally develop and maintain an AI research roadmap. ALIGNER ensure that project results are applicable and relevant by not only including three LEA organisations as full partners of the project, but also establishing two external advisory boards, one for LEA practitioners and one for researchers, industry professionals, ethicists, and civil society. The members of these boards will build the core stakeholders participating at ALIGNER workshops.

The ForMAT project addresses limitations in forensic DNA profiling, particularly in criminal cases, disaster victim identification (DVI), and legal age assessment for asylum claimants. Traditional DNA methods struggle with unsolved cases, mass disasters, and legal age estimation. ForMAT focuses on DNA methylation (DNAm) as a solution, using epigenetic markers to estimate age and lifestyles, as well to predict tissue type. This approach enhances criminal investigations by narrowing suspect profiles and expedites missing person identification in mass disasters, improving the return of remains to families. In asylum cases, DNAm offers a radiation-free alternative for assessing age, reducing reliance on X-rays. ForMAT builds on the VISAGE project, aiming to advance these tools from Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 5 to TRL 7. By developing new DNAm kits and a bioinformatic applicaiton including forensic prediction models, ForMAT enables law enforcement to estimate age, to infer lifestyles and to identify the tissue-of origin from DNA samples. Kits include a DNAm somatic kit, as well as a DNAm germ-line kit for criminal cases, a DNAm DVI kit for guiding in the identification process of human remains, and a DNAm legal age kit for asylum assessments. The integration of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies, including second- and third-generation sequencing, enhances forensic workflows and ensures high accuracy even with degraded samples. The ForMAT consortium , consisting of 11 EU institutions, leverages expertise across countries and disciplines to bring these innovations to real-world use. Members include leading universities, police bodies, and forensic institutes, committed to scaling up, testing, and validating these tools across Europe. Their involvement in international forensic boards ensures widespread dissemination, aiming for broad adoption of ForMAT’s epigenetic molecular tools in forensic science, ultimately enhancing investigative practices and public safety.

The increasing number of travellerscrossing European borders is putting a mounting pressure on the everyday handling of border checks. Coping with limited resources, border control authorities have to perform a higher number of checks on travellers, while at the same time maintaining national security. Consequently, the experience of both European and third country travellersis deteriorating, due to the extra time they have to spend at the border crossing points. In that sense, flexible, automated and scalable no-gate crossing solutions may offer an effective support to border control authorities, to make border checks faster and more efficient. Nevertheless, the intensive use of these technologies bears the risk of infringing individuals’ rights and freedoms, including privacy and personal data protection. Therefore, a thorough assessment of no-gate crossing point solutions, from asocial acceptance, ethical and legalperspective, is required prior to their implementation. PERSONA (Privacy, Ethical, Regulatory, and SOcial No-gate crossing point solutions Acceptance) project’s main goal is to design and establish an integrated impact assessment method (IAM PERSONA) to appropriately evaluate the impacts of no-gate crossing point solutions, taking into account social acceptance, ethical and legal requirements, to ensure that these technologies meet the expectations of public authorities and travellers. The main outcome of the project will be a handbook, available in open access, that will provide guidance inorder to drive the innovation and deployment of future no-gate crossing point solutions by industry and border authorities, while maintaining their societal acceptance

EITHOS will develop a novel Identity Theft Observatory System, empowering European citizens, Law Enforcements Agencies (LEAs), and policy makers to further contribute to the prevention, detection, and investigation of identity theft related crime. It will provide a common gateway for identity theft information and intelligence in Europe, built on top of a modern technological back end, based on two pillars: (1) Inform & Educate European citizens through the observatory itself and via innovative awareness campaigns regarding the safety of their personal data and identity; (2) Identify & address the challenges that Police Authorities face against identity theft and develop a robust software toolset to support them and enhance their investigations. The proposed system will provide easy access to information and intelligence about previous and current identity theft related trends (such as the methods that fraudsters follow to steal information, personal data protection, or the ways that victims can be supported) through its front end, while offering a cutting-edge AI-based technological toolkit via its back end. Additionally, the project will analyse the societal impact of identity theft, as well as the legal framework under which the utilisation of AI remote technologies and e-evidence exchange can be achieved. Focusing on educating civil society and addressing the obstacles that hinder LEAs to efficiently fight identity theft, EITHOS differentiates from previous projects and other market solutions which often concentrate on digital identity management and secure transactions.

The number of incidents where police officers are first responders in critical situations with severe threat circumstances has drastically increased. A major challenge for these first responding officers is to properly evaluate the situation and decide how to further proceed and to assess and choose the most appropriate strategy. The appropriateness of this decision is highly critical as it has a strong impact on the potential success of the operation as well as on the potential impacts, scene environment (e.g. witnesses, involved civilians, etc.) and consequences. So the SHOTPROS project aims to investigate the influence of psychological and contextual human factors (HFs) on the behaviour of decision-making and acting (DMA) of police officers under stress and in high-risk operational situations in order to design better training for police officers to improve DMA Performance. SHOTPROS will develop a Virtual Reality (VR) solution to experimentally assess the degree to which these factors influence DMA behaviour. Subsequently the project will develop a HF-rooted training curriculum and a corresponding VR training solution to provide a comprehensive framework for practical training for decision-making and acting under stress and in high-risk (DMA-SR) situations in order to improve performance.The training will increase DMA-SR performance which will lead to better and more correct decisions (from several perspectives, e.g. law, ethic, etc.), to keep the guidance in threatened situations, to minimise use of force occurrences, and accordingly, to maximise the avoidance of casualties and collateral damage, such as panic and cascading or escalating effects. SHOTPROS involves 6 law enforcement agencies (LEA) as it sees the capabilities of effective, efficient and “correct” DMA-SR of police forces as an utmost important part of a European Security Model and a high need for the daily combat against crime, terrorism, CBRNe threats and radicalisms.