Behind Enemy Minds

In 2014 the Ghent chief of police added Predictive Policing as a new zonal priority project 2014-2019) headed by chief commissioner Frederik Van Belle. Predictive Policing was developed in Israel as an addition to racial profiling. In Europe it was first adopted in the world of art and museum security. Around the same time as the Ghent project, many police departments started looking into predictive profiling and behavior detection. It gained traction after the 2016 Brussels attacks. All over the world predictive profilers and behavior detection trainings popped up. As of now, the merits of predictive profiling and behavior detection are quite controversial and lacking any scientific confirmation. We have found from experience that our colleagues, not unlike most people from the general population, are not very skilled in reading people (their clues, body language, behavior, motives), often relying on a few highlighted signals and common misconceptions of so-called untruthful behavior. That is why we rather shy away from the prevailing behavior detection tropes in law enforcement.

We have been working together with the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) since the beginning. They provide an exquisite location and a challenging setting for red teaming exercises. In return, we trained their security personnel and specialized in art/museum security. We participated, among others, at an Art Crime Conference in Amelia, Italy, organized by ARCA (the Association for Research into Crime against Art). We exchanged information with PP10, the Dutch public-private control rooms for the big museums in Amsterdam (including Van Gogh). We organized our own conference on art crime thanks to the Van Eyck-year in Ghent: ‘OMG! Van Eyck as stolen!’ on February 11^th, 2020 in the MSK.

In the first week of December 2022, the Ghent Local Police Force will host a CEPOL-training on ‘Behind Enemy Minds’ (i.e. the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training). We are the pilot, I am heading a team of colleagues from Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands on a 5-day training. It will include a red teaming museum heist in the museum and a workshop on barrier models.