Dataharvest 2024 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

The police and the judicial system use a lot of automated decision-making systems to support their work. Sometimes they accuse innocent people or discriminate against particular population groups. Researching these systems presents many challenges, mostly because the police are very secretive about how they manage them, where they obtain the data to train them, and what data inputs are used for analysis. In most cases, both the inner workings of the algorithms and their effects on individuals are opaque. This makes journalistic research in this area essential, even though it is sometimes blocked by the authorities and by public administrations. This session will look at how to accomplish this kind of research and reporting. We will present information and recently unveiled data on several algorithms and AI systems used in Germany and Spain. We will also expand on the methodologies we used to uncover this information and the difficulties that we faced during the research. Attendees will be able to learn about how to report on this niche field, which mixes technology and crime reporting, and how to face the problems of looking at the police from a new perspective - the technological one.