AI and Machine Learning Forensic Tools

This page exists because of a distinction one force drew in public that almost no other has: the Czech Police, in a freedom-of-information response published on its own website, named which of its forensic tools it classifies as applying machine learning, and separately named those it does not.

The tools it identified as machine learning were ABBYY FineReader for optical character recognition, BriefCam for video analytics, Magnet AXIOM for digital forensic examination, Cellebrite UFED for mobile device extraction, and speech-to-text products from Phonexia and Newton. Alongside them it named TrueAllele, STRmix, LRmix, StatistiX, CODIS and FamLinkX as fixed statistical or probabilistic systems that it does not consider AI.

That second list matters as much as the first. Probabilistic genotyping software produces likelihood ratios from DNA mixtures using defined statistical models; it is complex, consequential and contested, but it is not machine learning, and a force saying so plainly is unusually precise. Much reporting on forensic AI does not make the distinction at all.

The force's own scope statement is equally worth recording: it states these tools are used for preliminary information processing and do not independently collect, evaluate or generate evidence. That is a limitation described by the force rather than inferred from the technology.

WHY THIS IS AN OVERVIEW RATHER THAN A DESCRIPTION

Several of the products named here are substantial systems in their own right, deployed well beyond the Czech Republic, and each raises different questions. Grouping them under one heading obscured that. They now have their own pages, linked below, and this page covers only the category and the disclosure that defined it.

Two of the named tools do not have pages. ABBYY FineReader is general-purpose optical character recognition sold across many industries rather than a policing product, and its inclusion reflects that OCR uses machine learning rather than that it is a law enforcement system. Newton could not be identified with confidence from any source reviewed beyond its appearance in this disclosure, and no page has been created asserting the existence of a product this site cannot describe accurately.

WHAT THIS TELLS YOU ABOUT DISCLOSURE GENERALLY

The Czech response is valuable less for what it reveals about Czech policing than as a demonstration of what a force can disclose when asked. It names products, distinguishes categories of software, states a scope limitation, and records that a fundamental-rights impact assessment under the EU AI Act is planned but cannot yet be scoped because the necessary methodology has not been published.

Most forces in this catalogue have disclosed considerably less. Where entries elsewhere on this site record a technology as "not specified in the source", that is usually because no comparable disclosure exists.

WHAT IS NOT ESTABLISHED

Whether other forces use the same combination of tools is unknown; this list reflects one force's disclosure, not a survey.

The scale of use within Czech policing — how often these tools are used, in what proportion of cases — is not addressed by the disclosure.

Whether the fundamental-rights impact assessment has since been completed is not established.