The challenges of international police reform assistance are formidable. Conventional top-down institutional reform has proven neither effective nor sustainable. Community-based policing (COP) holds promise, however evaluations have pointed to a lack of in-depth understanding of police-community relations in police reform assistance. This project will conduct integrated social and technical research on COP in post-conflict countries in S.E. Europe, Asia, Africa and Central America. New knowledge, reflection on lessons learnt and “best practices” will support both national police and EU/International police reform assistance. The project will lead to a better understanding of police-community relations, and innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) for enhancing these relations in post-conflict countries undergoing serious security reform. Linking social and technological research, the project will study social, cultural, human security, legal and ethical dimensions of COP to understand how citizens and police can develop sustainable relations with the use of ICTs. We will explore how technological innovation can support COP in crime reporting and prevention. The project will explore ICT solutions to facilitate, strengthen and accelerate positive COP efforts and police-citizen interactions where trust levels are weak. Solutions will depend on the context and identified needs of end-users: communities, local police, national and international police (EU/UN), and policymakers, and may include citizen reporting, information monitoring, mobile value transfer, or improved organizational systems. The project includes a Policing Experts Network whose role is to support research planning, and dissemination and exploitation of findings, grounding the research in police practice. This will ensure findings are communicated by engaged police practitioners, and directly applied in COP education and training curricula in Europe and case countries.

Intelligence Network & Secure Platform for Evidence Correlation and Transfer (INSPECTr). The principal objective of INSPECTr will be to develop a shared intelligent platform and a novel process for gathering, analysing, prioritising and presenting key data to help in the prediction, detection and management of crime in support of multiple agencies at local, national and international level. This data will originate from the outputs of free and commercial digital forensic tools complemented by online resource gathering . Using both structured and unstructured data as input, the developed platform will facilitate the ingestion and homogenisation of this data with increased levels of automisation, allowing for interoperability between outputs from multiple data formats. Various knowledge discovery techniques will allow the investigator to visualise and bookmark important evidential material and export it to an investigative report. In addition to providing basic and advanced (cognitive) cross-correlation analysis with existing case data, this technique will aim to improve knowledge discovery across exhibit analysis within a case, between separate cases and ultimately, between interjurisdictional investigations. INSPECTr will deploy big data analytics, cognitive machine learning and blockchain approaches to significantly improve digital and forensics capabilities for pan-European LEAs. INSPECTr intends to reduce the complexity and the costs in law enforcement agencies and related actors to use leading edge analytical tools proportionally and in line with relevant legislation (including fundamental rights), with extended options for multi-level and cross-border collaboration for both reactive and preventive policing and facilitate the detection/prediction of cybercrime operations/trends. The final developed platform will be freely available to all LEAs.

Mobile devices, especially smartphones represent a unique challenge for law enforcement. Criminal offenders use phones to communicate, coordinate, organise and execute criminal actions. This is especially true for organised crime and terrorist organisations. This development provides new challenges for criminal prosecution and it is vital to empower law enforcement to access the data stored on mobile devices to use it as court evidence in a trustworthy and reliable manner. The overarching objective of FORMOBILE is to establish a complete end to end forensic investigation chain, targeting for mobile devices. To achieve this goal three objectives will be pursued. Novel tools shall be developed that include the acquisition of previously unavailable mobile data, unlocking mobile devices, as well as the decoding and analysis of mobile data. Based on the definition of requirements of law enforcement and legal and ethical issues a new mobile forensics standard shall be developed. With the developments of the new standard and the new tools, training for police and criminal prosecution will be established, providing the end users with the latest knowledge in a novel and an innovative curriculum to ensure a quality standard of investigations. The European Union has developed as a Security Union, building on the European Agenda on Security. This aims to ensure that people live in an area of freedom, security and justice, without internal frontiers. To strengthen digital forensics in the context of criminal investigations is crucial to achieve this vision. FORMOBILE contributes to the fight against virtually all forms of crime. This is because mobile devices are widely used in crimes, especially in the arrangement of conspiracies. Yet, there are crimes more closely related to mobile devices; this includes child abuse and emerging forms of cybercrime in particular. To fight crime effectively, law enforcement has to be empowered to access all evidence stored on mobile devices.