AI in policing: Spain
Every documented deployment of artificial intelligence by law enforcement in Spain currently recorded on this site, drawn from the deployment tracker. Each entry is tied to a published source and carries the date it was last checked.
Deployments
ES Spanish National Police AI Report Analysis Discontinued
- 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
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.
Source: Civio, reporting the Directorate General of Police's confirmation · last checked 2026-08-24
ES Spanish police (multi-force) Algorithmic Risk Assessment Operational
- Legal basis
- Organic Law 1/2004 on Comprehensive Protection Measures against Gender Violence; operated by the Secretariat of State for Security, Interior Ministry
- Oversight
- No dedicated external regulator identified; Eticas Foundation conducted an independent reverse-engineered audit in 2021 after offering a pro-bono audit in 2018 and receiving no response
Launched 2007, updated to VioGen 5.0 in 2019, with an AI pilot to refine the model from 2022. Runs nationwide excluding the Basque Country and Catalonia, which operate separately. Officers complete two questionnaires (Police Risk Assessment/VPR and Police Risk Evolution Assessment/VPER) covering 35 indicators, producing a score sorting cases into five bands (unappreciated/negligible, low, medium, high, extreme) that determines the level of police protection assigned to a victim. Eticas describes the method as classical statistical weighting rather than machine learning. Eticas's 2021 audit found officers keep the automatic outcome in 95% of cases despite it being designed as an overridable recommendation. New York Times reporting found at least 247 women killed by partners since 2007 after VioGen assessment, at least 55 of them scored negligible or low risk. As of 2025: roughly 92,000 active cases, 83% classified low or negligible risk. This is decision-support and risk assessment rather than the narrower predictive-policing sense of forecasting where crime will occur.
Source: European Commission Interoperable Europe Portal; AlgorithmWatch; Eticas Foundation · last checked 2026-08-24