Major IT project Police 2020 is making slow but steady progress

The major IT construction site for the P20 police data center is continuing after various delays. This was reported by the German government, which provided an insight into the status of the work in response to a request from the Left Party group in the Bundestag. The federal and state interior ministers agreed on an initial outline for the modernization, digitalization and standardization of the frayed police IT architecture back in 2016. However, contrary to the original name "Police 2020", not much happened afterwards for a long time. According to the government, P20 is now only "in the implementation phase". The concept is complete.

According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), the overall program currently consists of eleven teams working on 42 projects as part of the now ongoing agile development in associated "release trains (RTs)". The focus is on the group that is driving forward the planned Data House Ecosystem (DHÖS). This includes nine projects which, in addition to the core components and "value-added apps", include identity and access management (IAM) for access control and logging.

The "RT Analysis" contains just as many projects. These include the cloud, open source intelligence (OSINT), police speaker identification (PSI) and the automated detection of child sexual abuse using artificial intelligence (AI).

Palantir alternative coming in 2025 at the earliest

The police capabilities in the P20 program are to be developed and implemented as part of the creation of the P20-DHÖS. For example, a social media content management tool (SMCMT) for monitoring content in social networks and a "repeat prediction assistant" (WiPrAs) are already in operation. The in-house development of the parts for cross-procedural research and analysis, which are intended to form an alternative to Palantir & Co, requires "at least partial development of the data warehouse" for integration. The first results are expected in 2025. The extent to which AI will be used "has not yet been decided".

"The project goal of the initial data house (iDH) was achieved on schedule in 2023," the government is pleased to report. In 2024, the focus will be on expanding it into a data processing data house. This is a system in which police case processing data can be stored, searched, read and deleted. It is expected to go live "one year earlier" than planned. However, "meeting the high performance requirements while at the same time ensuring maximum technical vendor independence" is still a "challenge critical to success". The approach of "polyglot data storage based on open-source products" was deliberately chosen for this purpose.

There are still some problems with the analysis network

Meanwhile, the case processing system (VBS) of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), which is to be connected to P20 along with many other databases, has grown considerably. As of September, around 30 million cases were stored in it, three million more than six months previously.

Another central pillar of the DHÖS is the Police Information and Analysis Network (PIAV). Stages 5 to 7 of this platform were scheduled to go live by mid-2025. The PIAV files for pharmaceutical and counterfeit money crime, money laundering, corruption, politically motivated and organized crime as well as economic and environmental crime are to be set up there. The BMI admits that this is not expected until the beginning of March 2026.

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