XLAW - Trends and pattern discovery in crimes

This information was sourced from the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (2026): PSTW: Public Sector Tech Watch latest dataset of selected cases. [Dataset] doi: 10.2905/JRC.J1MWC9R PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/e8e7bddd-8510-4936-9fa6-7e1b399cbd92. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

XLAW software also developed by a law enforcement official and it has already been deployed in the cities of Naples, Modena, Prato, Salerno, Livorno, Trieste, Trento, and Venice (Business Insider 2019). Law information website Altalex reports that the system’s accuracy is 87-93% in Naples, 92-93% in Venice, and 94% in Prato, but, at the moment, no independent auditing or fact-checking is publicly available for each of these trials.

XLAW is software that uses probabilistic, machine learning-powered solution for trends and pattern discovery in crimes. This implies that one can deduce — or more accurately, induce — how criminal behavior will unfold, before it has happened, by intelligent analysis of the criminal history of a location over time. Lombardo claims to have done this by carefully analyzing 20 years of data and also by calling on his experience in the field.

As a result, thanks to XLAW, law enforcement officials can be alerted and deployed on the scene before a crime has even happened. At the same time, XLAW provides police officers with details as precise as “genre, height, citizenship, distinguishing features, and biometrics” of a potential suspect.

XLAW has a strong predictive component to it. In the case of Venice, for example, State Police boasted that “84% of felonies (“fatti-reato”) that have been either attempted or committed had been foreseen by the system”. As a result, XLAW is regularly portrayed as a success story.

Budget: Not disclosed