On 20 February 2025, Europol published a new report providing law enforcement agencies with a structured approach to evaluating new technologies while upholding fundamental rights and public trust. The report titled Assessing Technologies in Law Enforcement: A Method for Ethical Decision-Making is intended to be a living, dynamic document that will serve as a permanent resource for law enforcement and policy makers.

The first part of the report describes a method for applying ethics and core values to practical decision-making: a seven-step ethical assessment method to help law enforcement agencies meet the challenges of digital transformation. It aims to ensure that the adoption and use of new technologies are consistent with core values such as transparency, fairness, privacy, and accountability. The seven steps to be used in evaluating technology are:

(1) Description of the moral problem;

(2) Collection of relevant facts about the case, such as facts about the technology and information about the context and relevant legislation;

(3) Mapping of the different perspectives of the parties affected by the technology;

(4) Explanation and identification of the most important normative values relevant to the case, such as transparency, fairness, privacy, and accountability but also honesty, autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, social justice, etc.;

(5) Formulation of value-based solutions, identification of the options;

(6) Further scrutiny of the value-based options identified in the fifth step by considering their correctness and consequences; consequences for permissible options;

(7) Summary of the process to ensure coherence/consistency of reasoning and choice.

In the second part of the report, cases of use are outlined to illustrate the method. Examples include video analytics technology, measuring the risks of reoffending in cases of gender-based violence, model analysis of open-source data scraping, using a chatbot to prevent child sexual abuse online, and automated analysis of large and complex datasets.