Predictive policing and predictive justice: Ethics, data protection, and the AI act

In the latest years, there has been an increasing tingrend for police forces and judicial authorities to employ predictive profiling technologies in justice and law enforcement, posing major risks to fundamental rights of citizens. These systems create ontologies, perform risk assessment, and even predict the probability of re-offense. However, there is a lack of transparency in how those systems are trained, tested, validated and employed, and research has shown that they are biased against marginalized groups. The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, by introducing a new legal basis for the processing of special categories of personal data without appropriate safeguards, and without a coherent legal framework with the Law Enforcement Directive, creates a source of potential issues detrimental to data subjects’ rights and freedoms. This article explores the intersection between the AI Act and the LED Directive, highlighting gaps and inconsistencies in the related legal framework.