Major IT project Police 2020 is making slow but steady progress

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The P20 Police Data House program has made the step from the conception to the implementation phase, according to the government. 11 teams are working on 42 projects.

After various delays, the large-scale IT construction site for the P20 police data center is continuing steadily. This was reported by the German government, which provided an insight into the status of the construction work in response to a request from the Left Party group in the Bundestag. The federal and state interior ministers had already agreed on an initial outline for the modernization, digitalization and standardization of the frayed police IT architecture in 2016. However, contrary to the original name "Police 2020", not much happened afterward for a long time. According to the executive, P20 is now only "in the implementation phase". There are no longer any components in the pure conception phase.

Eleven teams and 42 projects

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), writes the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI). The focus is on the group that is driving forward the planned data house ecosystem (DHÖS). It is divided into 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 images 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 maintaining 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, compared to just under 27 million in March 2023.

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. However, the BMI admits that this is now not expected until the beginning of March 2026.

(nie)