Legal basis

No specific statute authorised its use for its first eight years. The interior ministry's own inspection concluded it was used in a judicial, retrospective context rather than real-time administrative surveillance, which affects but does not resolve its legal footing

Oversight

Inter-inspectorate report (IGA, IGPN, IGGN), commissioned by the interior ministry and published October 2024

This is more precise, and more interesting, than a flat operational status conveys, and is worth recording carefully. Investigative outlet Disclose revealed in November 2023 that police and gendarmerie had used BriefCam since 2015 without a clear legal basis, including its facial recognition capability, which is illegal in French public space. The gendarmerie suspended use three days after the report; the national police suspended use in December 2023. The official inter-inspectorate report, finalised February 2024 and published October 2024, examined approximately 600 total uses and found exactly one illegal facial-recognition use. It recommended lifting the suspension and continuing to use BriefCam in investigative services until it can be replaced by a sovereign French-developed system, Systeme V, which has no facial recognition capability and was still described as under development in parliamentary answers as recently as mid-2025. This entry is recorded as operational on the basis that the report recommended resuming use pending that replacement, but the transition to Systeme V should be treated as ongoing rather than complete.

Source: Disclose (original investigation); French Ministry of the Interior inter-inspectorate report · last checked 2026-08-25

Legal basis

Not detailed in the source reviewed

Oversight

Documented via the Dutch government's own public algorithm register, a transparency mechanism

The Dutch police's own entry in the government's official algorithm register describes a tool using convolutional neural network and deep learning models to identify moving objects in video and classify them by characteristics including type (person or vehicle), colour, size and direction of movement, letting investigators combine filters such as a person on a bicycle wearing a particular colour travelling in a particular direction. Results are reviewed by police staff; the register states the algorithm itself does not make investigative decisions. This is one of the clearest official public descriptions found anywhere of how this class of video analytics tool actually works.

Source: Dutch government algorithm register (Algoritmeregister) · last checked 2026-08-25

Legal basis

Not detailed in the source reviewed

Oversight

Not detailed in the source reviewed

The Brussels police zone's own description states it uses BriefCam to convert hours of CCTV footage into minutes of targeted review. Recorded with lower confidence than the French and Dutch entries above: the source is the police force's own promotional description rather than an independent inspection or an official transparency register, and no usage statistics or legal framework were available in the material reviewed. Sourcing note, verified August 2026: the available documentation is vendor case-study material rather than a police or government disclosure, and should be read as such. It describes the deployment as operated by the Brussels Regional Informatics Centre (BRIC), which since around 2014-2015 has centralised video from six local police zones, the Metro system and Bruxelles Mobilite onto a single platform. In that documentation BriefCam functions as an analytics extension within a Genetec Security Center video management deployment, rather than as a standalone force procurement. Two caveats follow: the operator is a regional IT body serving multiple police zones rather than a single police zone, and the vendor material does not establish the specific start date recorded on this entry. Both points would benefit from a Belgian procurement or oversight-body source.

Source: BriefCam vendor case study; Genetec customer story · last checked 2026-08-25

Legal basis

No dedicated statute for the tools themselves. The disclosure was published under Section 5(3) of Act No. 106/1999 Coll. on free access to information. The force states it is preparing for obligations under EU Regulation 2024/1689 (the AI Act).

Oversight

No dedicated regulator identified. The force states it plans to carry out a fundamental-rights impact assessment once AI Office and European Commission methodology is published.

The Czech Police's own public statement is unusual in explicitly distinguishing which of its forensic tools it considers AI/machine learning (this list) from which it does not: it names TrueAllele, STRmix, LRmix, StatistiX, CODIS and FamLinkX as fixed statistical or probabilistic systems it does not classify as AI. The force states the AI/ML tools listed here are used for preliminary information processing and do not independently collect, evaluate or generate evidence. This entry bundles several distinct tools under one entry because the source describes them collectively rather than confirming each one's individual deployment scale. Sourcing, verified August 2026: this comes from the Czech Police's own freedom-of-information response, published on its website under Section 5(3) of Act No. 106/1999 Coll. The wording confirms the entry's central point directly. The force states it does not currently use any AI system to independently collect, evaluate or generate evidence, and that tools applying machine learning technologies are used for partial tasks in the preliminary processing of information, naming ABBYY FineReader, BriefCam, Magnet AXIOM, Cellebrite UFED, speech-to-text from Phonexia and Newton, together with outputs from Ministry of the Interior security research projects. The same response records that the force plans to conduct a fundamental-rights impact assessment under the EU AI Act, but that it does not yet know the required content, scope or form because the relevant AI Office and European Commission methodology has not been published. For independent context rather than force self-description, the civil society organisation Iuridicum Remedium has published a mapping study of Czech police AI use ('Cesky Minority Report'), which covers automated recognition of faces, sounds and text and is a useful counterweight to a disclosure written by the force itself.

Source: Policie CR, published freedom-of-information response · last checked 2026-08-25