Europol Excellence Awards in Innovation 2022

On 4 October, Europol awarded the Europol Excellence Awards in Innovation at the annual European Police Chiefs Convention 2022. First awarded in 2021, this distinction continues to put the spotlight on the law enforcement community's most innovative initiatives and operations.

Europol received more than 70 nominations from law enforcement organisations across 14 countries in Europe, of which two have been selected: one award for the most innovative law enforcement project and one award for the most innovative law enforcement operation. 

The winners of the two awards were carefully assessed and selected by a dedicated panel, which included the European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson, the Police Chiefs of France, the Czech Republic and Sweden, and Europol’s Executive Director.

The Head of the Europol Innovation Lab, Grégory Mounier said:

Innovation is at the heart of modern policing, and Europol is striving to ensure that the European law enforcement community benefits from the most innovative technologies and tools to keep European citizens safe. The outstanding quality of the 70 projects and operations nominated this year, is not only a success for the Europol Excellence Awards in Innovation but it is also a testimony of the incredible innovative and creative spirit that drives our law enforcement colleagues around Europe. The Europol Innovation Lab will invite the most promising nominees to take part in follow-up events, with the aim of sharing innovative ideas with the larger European law enforcement community.

The Excellence Award for the most innovative project 

The award for the most innovative project went this year to the French Gendarmerie for the creation of an Artificial Intelligence Tools Platform. The platform provides a suite of advanced criminal analysis tools specifically developed to enable police officers to benefit from artificial intelligence when processing criminal information. The platform includes fingerprint analysis and a comparison tool, firearms and drug detection function, speech to text transcription, entity extraction and automatic translation tools in more than 100 languages.  The tools were developed in the framework of EU Horizon 2020 projects and under the supervision of the data protection authority of the French Gendarmerie. The platform is currently available to 600 criminal analysts across France and tools are made available to other law enforcement agencies in Europe via the Europol Innovation Lab Tool repository. 

The Excellence Award for the most innovative operation

The most innovative operation was awarded to the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) for Operation HYDRA. In April 2022, the BKA, in partnership with the United States and Europol, took down the largest ever darknet market place in the world with more than 16 million users and an estimated annual turnover of more than EUR 1.23 billion. As a result of the BKA's innovative approach, the entire criminal infrastructure was rendered unusable and led to the seizure of more than 50 servers and 1.9 petabytes of data.  

Innovation in international Law Enforcement cooperation

The Europol Excellence Awards in Innovation highlight how effective modern day law enforcement requires partnership and collaboration, whether in teams of officers, between forces, in multi-agency operations or through wider public sector involvement.

The Awards also recognise that accomplishments arise from a blend of innovative, committed and well-trained personnel, serving, engaging and protecting the public while using technology efficiently and effectively. These awards should inspire the European law enforcement community by providing insights into successful innovation.

Europol was mandated by the Justice and Home Affairs ministers from all the EU Member States at the end of 2019 to create an Innovation Lab to support the law enforcement community in innovation. The Lab aims to identify, promote and develop innovative concrete solutions supporting the EU Member States' operational work. These will help investigators and analysts to make the most of the opportunities offered by new technologies to avoid duplication of work, create synergies and pool resources. The activities of the Lab are directly linked to the strategic priorities as laid out in the Europol Strategy 2020+, which states that Europol shall be at the forefront of law enforcement innovation and research.