Fair Trials in December 2023 wrote Partial ban on ‘predictive’ policing and crime prediction systems included in final EU AI Act. The NGO is worried about the exemptions in the Act and is waiting for the final text:

The actual text of the finalised Act remains unpublished so a full analysis, including precise details of the ban on predictive policing and crime prediction systems will have to wait.

Additions

Addition 3 April 2024
EDRi: EU’s AI Act fails to set gold standard for human rights,

Predictive policing, live public facial recognition, biometric categorisation and emotion recognition are only partially banned, legitimising these dangerous practices:

• We called for comprehensive bans against any use of AI that isn’t compatible with rights and freedoms – such as proclaimed AI ‘mind reading’, biometric surveillance systems that treat us as walking barcodes, or algorithms used to decide whether we are innocent or guilty. All of these examples are now partially banned in the AI Act, which is an important signal that the EU is prepared to draw red lines against unacceptably harmful uses of AI.
• At the same time, all of these bans contain significant and disappointing loopholes, which means that they will not achieve their full potential. In some cases, these loopholes risk having the opposite effect from what a ban should: they give the signal that some forms of biometric mass surveillance and AI-fuelled discrimination are legitimate in the EU, which risks setting a dangerous global precedent.
  For example, the fact that emotion recognition and biometric categorisation systems are prohibited in the workplace and in education settings, but are still allowed when used by law enforcement and migration authorities, signal that the EU’s will to test the most abusive and intrusive surveillance systems against the most marginalised in society.
• Moreover, when it comes to live public facial recognition, the Act paves the way to legalise some specific uses of these systems for the first time ever in the EU – despite our analysis showing that all public-space uses of these systems constitute an unacceptable violation of everyone’s rights and freedoms.

Addition 20 June 2024
The thesis of Magdalena Brewczyńska, Policing via banks: the question of legitimacy of personal data sharing, is very relevant. Read the summary on NJBlog.

Addition 25 July 2024
Security.nl reports on an European predictive policing project, the BIGDATPOL-project: “The BIGDATPOL research group is an ambitious team led by Prof Dr Wim Hardyns at the Department of Criminology, Criminal Law, and Social Law, Ghent University. Prof Dr Hardyns has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council to develop an evidence-based big data policing model that will be tested in several European cities“.