Big Data applied to criminal investigations: expectations of professionals of police cooperation in the European Union

ABSTRACT

Big Data is seen as an increasingly important tool to support policing activities, define security governance policies and assist criminal investigations. Although significant literature has explored the predictive capabilities of Big Data, there has been less focus on the uses of Big Data in criminal investigations, focused on detection and apprehension that occur after a crime has been committed. This article aims to fill this gap through the lens of expectations of professionals involved in police cooperation in the European Union. Based upon a set of qualitative interviews, our analysis explores these professionals’ expectations for the application of Big Data techniques in criminal investigations by using DNA data held in national criminal DNA databases and, therefore, potentially increasing the interoperability between genetic and non-genetic data. Our results reveal a flexible repertoire of interpretation of the expectations for the uses of Big Data in criminal investigations and its associated potential risks and benefits. The perceived benefits relate to expectations for Big Data’s potential to advance cold cases and strengthen the interoperability of multiple datasets in ways that produce intelligence valuable for criminal investigations. Perceived risks concern the difficulties associated with investigating large sets of data, the potential for enforcing genetic discrimination, and threatening privacy and human rights.

KEYWORDS:

• Big Data
• criminal investigation
• expectations
• European Union

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Europol is the police service responsible for supporting the EU Members States in the fight against terrorism, cybercrime and other serious and organized forms of crime. Check https://www.europol.europa.eu/ (last access on 31 March 2020).

2 Method that aims to allocate police resources in locations and timeframes where crimes are more likely to occur to prevent them (Babuta 2017).

3 Method aimed at creating creates matrices that direct police activities towards the certain of crimes, more probable to occur (Sherman 2013).

4 Method that considers the criminal record of individuals, assigning them a certain risk level (Babuta 2017; Brayne 2017).

5 Among these 22 professionals interviewed, 3 participants declared that they did not know what Big Data was and/or that they had not heard about it before. Their views are not included in the article’s analysis.

6 The countries where the interviews were conducted are Spain, Poland, France, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Italy, Finland, Cyprus, Malta, Germany, Lithuania and Latvia.

Additional information

Funding

This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. [648608]), within the project “EXCHANGE – Forensic geneticists and the transnational exchange of DNA data in the EU: Engaging science with social control, citizenship and democracy” led by Helena Machado and hosted at the Communication and Society Research Centre, Institute for Social Sciences of University of Minho. This work is also supported by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) through 2020.04764.BD; CEECIND/00984/2018; CEECINST/00157/2018 and UIDB/00736/2020.