Spain, Spain, national
Spanish National Police
AI Report Analysis, supplied by VeriPol
DiscontinuedCivil society reportPAI-E4C2FC58
- Body
- Spanish National Police
- Country
- Spain
- Area
- Spain, national
- Technology
- AI Report Analysis
- Supplier
- VeriPol
- Status
- Discontinued
Use has ended, on the evidence of a public source. - Stage
- Withdrawn
- Since
- 2018
- Legal basis
- No dedicated statutory basis. The EU AI Act, in force from July 2024, classified tools of this kind as high risk, which is widely reported as a factor in the decision to stop using it.
- Oversight
- Spain's Consejo de Transparencia y Buen Gobierno, which ordered the Interior Ministry to release information about the tool following requests by the transparency organisation Civio
- Evidence
- Civil society report
Report by a human rights or civil liberties organisation - Source
- Civio, reporting the Directorate General of Police's confirmation
- Last checked
- Record code
PAI-E4C2FC58
Notes
VeriPol applied natural language analysis to written robbery reports to flag characteristics statistically associated with false reports. It analysed the text of a report a victim or witness gave rather than physical evidence or camera footage, which makes it a materially different form of police AI from the video and biometric systems that make up most of this tracker.
Launched nationally in October 2018 after a 2017 pilot in Malaga and Murcia, and promoted at the time as over 90 percent accurate. Spain's Dirección General de la Policía confirmed to the transparency organisation Civio that the tool stopped being used on 21 October 2024, giving as its reason that it lacked validity in judicial proceedings. That date is three months after the EU AI Act came into force.
The evidence base was thin from the outset and this is central to understanding the entry rather than incidental to it. The model was trained on 1,122 robbery reports from 2015, and rested on a starting assumption that 57 percent of violent robbery reports are false. A University of Valencia analysis identified serious design deficiencies. Usage fell sharply over time, from roughly 84,000 reports analysed up to October 2020 to 3,762 in 2022. The Interior Ministry has declined to release which police stations deployed it or how often it was used, and a transparency complaint on that point remains open.