Croatia pressures EU to close police data gaps

In Antwerp, criminals used to steal containers of cocaine by hijacking a PIN code. A dock worker, a corrupt logistics contact, a six-digit number — and cocaine walked out of one of Europe's busiest ports inside a legal shipment. Belgian customs and the Port of Antwerp-Bruges eventually replaced the system with a secured digital release process. But the deeper problem was never one port's security. It was that customs, police, port operators and Europol each held fragments of the picture, and the law did not give them a fast enough way to put those pieces together.

Croatian Interior Minister Davor Bozinovic is now pressuring Europe to close that practical gap. Bozinovic has called for member states to feed more data into Europol and Schengen systems, and to make full use of border technologies like the Entry/Exit System (which logs when non-EU travellers cross external borders) and ETIAS (a pre-travel screening system for visa-exempt visitors) (Avaz). He is not proposing a new European police database. He is pressuring governments to use the existing ones more aggressively. No published legislative draft has accompanied the push.

What Antwerp Proves

Belgium makes the case concrete. Europol has warned that criminal networks infiltrate major European seaports through corrupt workers and logistics facilitators, targeting people and access points rather than cargo itself. Belgian authorities reportedly seized 55 tonnes of cocaine last year, while officials acknowledge larger volumes pass through undetected (Brussels Times). Belgian customs claim Antwerp seizures fell by nearly 70% in the first half of 2026, but that measures what gets caught, not what gets through (21News).

The European Ports Alliance, launched in January 2024 as a public-private partnership between member states, port operators and EU agencies, is the Commission's main answer (European Commission, Council of the EU). The logic is plain: if tighter controls in Antwerp push traffickers to Rotterdam or Piraeus, national solutions create displacement, not security. Switzerland joined the alliance for the same reason — drug logistics do not stop at EU borders (Tio.ch).

The Machinery Exists. National Governments Hold the Keys.

Europe already runs police and border databases that can do much of what Bozinovic wants. The Schengen Information System (SIS) is a real-time alert network for wanted persons and objects. Prüm II lets national police run automated searches across DNA, fingerprint and facial-image databases held by other member states, releasing details only after a match (Prüm II Regulation). Europol analyses and coordinates, but cannot command national forces (Europol Regulation).

These systems can already talk to each other technically, but each one has legally defined rules saying who can use the data and for what. A border database cannot simply become a general police dragnet (Interoperability Regulation).

The bottleneck is not missing technology. National police, customs and border agencies decide what goes into these systems, how fast, and how completely. Bozinovic's real target is the gap between what the systems can do and what governments actually feed into them.

Germany Shows Why "Share More" Hits a Wall

Germany illustrates why closing that gap is harder than it sounds. Berlin is pushing a federal police reform that would introduce AI-supported real-time facial recognition at railway stations, airports and border zones (DW). German digital-rights groups have linked these proposals to earlier constitutional challenges where courts found broad police data-fusion powers disproportionate (Digitalrechte). The EU's own AI Act permits real-time biometric identification in public spaces only under narrow law-enforcement exceptions (AI Act), and expansive national uses risk becoming courtroom battles (T-Online).

Germany's objection is not to Europol or SIS. It is to the national police files and surveillance tools that feed European systems. When governments expand biometric matching and AI analysis domestically, then connect those outputs to cross-border cooperation channels, the legal safeguards that make police power accountable come under strain.

One absence runs through this entire debate: almost no public voice represents the people whose data fuels these systems. Port workers facing security vetting, travellers logged by entry/exit records, suspects flagged by automated matching — they appear in the architecture as data inputs, not as participants in the governance conversation.

Bozinovic is right that criminal networks cross borders faster than police share intelligence. Belgium's port experience proves the cost of fragmentation. But Germany's constitutional debate proves something equally important: Europe's problem is no longer only how much police data moves across borders. It is who controls the safeguards once that data starts moving faster.