Forensic topic 2: Advanced easy to use in-situ forensic tools at the scene of crime

Specific challenge:

Rapid developments in technologies and communication in various fields go hand in hand with new opportunities for forensic science to investigate more and a greater variety of traces, to extract more information from less material, quicker than ever before. In order to to keep the standards of forensic science in Europe at a high level regarding juridical and technological questions. Meanwhile, organised crime and criminals do not limit themselves to regional or national borders. Their crimes are thus leaving traces in multiple countries. Cross border access to evidence has become an absolute necessity for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) and judicial authorities.

Evidence gathering, collection and exchange at EU level should be usable from the field to the judge, independently of the technology used to commit the crimes and of where the crimes have taken place. Rapid developments in technologies and communications in various fields go hand in hand with new opportunities for forensic science.

Proposals for this topic should take into account the existing EU and national projects in this field, such as the Council Conclusions on the vision for European Forensic Science 2020 which foresee the creation of a European Forensic Science Area and the development of forensic science infrastructure in Europe.""

Scope:

Proposals for this topic should focus on the development methodologies of tools and EU-wide standards for the secure storage, smart visualisation, access and the rapid exchange of forensic data supporting evidence.

A multianalytical platform integrating different techniques should be proposed in order to achieve better strategies for gathering and analyzing evidence in the field of forensic research. Relying on knowledge-based fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, different procedures, tools and algorithm should be developed within this platform, based on the standard outlined above.

Specific areas of research could be:

• Development of an analysis platform that could be deployed at the scene of the crime and which can be validated against the currently used forensic guidelines and standards.
• The establishment of a EU-wide databases on, for instance, new synthetic drugs and drug precursors,The creation of tools for tracking virtual currencies implicated in criminal transactions.
• Other types of pan-Eu databases on recognition.

In addition due to the variability and the wide range of crime types, procedures or methodologies should be developed or adapted to the specific crime features. Moreover, horizontal strategies could be proposed for profiling crimes or offenders and matching and predicting different type of crimes. This should lead to the establishment of a catalogue of these procedures or methodologies.

The development of a base line system for current and future end users should also be envisaged and the solution should follow Open Source concepts.

Where necessary new technologies should be developed for sampling, analysing, evaluating, interpreting and recording forensic evidence, with a view to achieve solid and court-proof forensic evidence that can be used during legal prosecution.

The use of the most advanced information technologies should allow improving and upgrading the current forensic systems in the European police institutions. The scope of the proposed tool should involve law enforcement bodies from the design phase to the prototyping and test phase.

Proposals adressing this topic may involve the use of classified background information (EU or national) or the production of security sensitive results. As such, certain project deliverables may require security classification. The final decision on the classification of projects is subject to the security evaluation.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between €9m and €12m would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected impact:

Projects under this topic should lead to the development of novel easy to use in-situ forensic tools, customised to the specific needs of EU LEA. Better profiling of crimes and offenders. Quicker matching of different types of crime. Shorter court cases due to the availability of more solid court proof forensic evidence.

For industry better understanding of modern operational LEA requirements, thus increasing their competitiveness.

Considerable improvement in the field of public security and improved trust of the citizen in the work of police forces in the EU.

The outcome of the proposal is expected to lead to development up to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 8; please see part G of the General Annexes.

Type of action: Innovation Actions