CEPOL Research & Science Conference 2022 MRU, Vilnius

Jesús Gómez

He is a police Officer of the Spanish National Police. He is currently working as a data scientist in the General Directorate for Coordination and Studies, Secretariat of State for Security, Ministry of Interior (Spain). He completed a PhD at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).


Sessions

06-09
09:00
20min
Increasing Efficiency in the Fight against Hate Crimes in Spain using Artificial Intelligence
Jesús Gómez

All types of crimes are deplorable and should be combated, however some of them generate more rejection in the society because of their nature. Among these are “hate crimes”, which are based in prejudices. However, societies have started to criminally punish hate crimes just in the last decades. These types of crimes involve a variety of conducts, which entails the complicated task of finding appropriate ways to prevent and tackle them. With the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more concretely NLP (Natural Language Processing), we are able to increase the efficiency of the Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) to combat hate crimes. Here, we present two projects in which the Spanish National Office Against Hate Crimes (Oficina Nacional de Lucha Contra los Delitos de Odio, ONDOD), of the Secretariat of State for Security (Ministry of the Interior, Spain), has participated. First of all, we have collaborated in a European project called ALRECO (Hate speech, racism and xenophobia: alert and coordinated response mechanisms), which has created some algorithms to automatically detect hate speech on Twitter. Now, we are collaborating in another European project called REAL-up (Hate Speech, Racism and Xenophobia: Alert and Response Mechanisms, Upstander discourse analysis). In this new project we are trying to include other social networks despite Twitter and also counter-narrative to tackle hate speech. The algorithms, based on transformer-based models such as BERT and BETO, achieved to classify well offensive tweets in Spanish language. The dataset used, which contain more than 5000 tweets labeled, has been also created in the context of the project. This project, coordinated by the Spanish Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia (OBERAXE), it is a good example of collaboration of different Ministries, the University and the third sector. On the other hand, ONDOD is developing, in collaboration with researchers of different Universities, an automatic tool to help police officers to record properly hate crimes, so they do not misclassify those crimes in which may be doubts whether there is a prejudice.
Paper co-authored by Carlos J. Máñez, Tomás Fernández Villazala, Javier López Gutiérrez

• Challenges of Artificial Intelligence for policing and law enforcement in the Digital Age
Panel Room I - I-414