Investigators Use Orasio’s AI Video Search to Trace Suspects After the 17 October Looting
French investigators hunting those behind the looting of 17 October, when more than 3,000 shops were vandalised and pillaged across France, are running huge volumes of video through an artificial intelligence tool from the French start-up Orasio, 20 Minutes reported on 23 October. Almost as many people have been arrested for violence or theft, and the number of suspects is expected to rise sharply as investigations progress.
From 18 October, judicial police and forensic technicians gathered fingerprints, DNA, witness statements and, above all, footage from the targeted shops, plus requisitioned recordings from transport networks, car parks, public buildings and municipal CCTV. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin said investigators would also use videos of the looting posted on social networks, and the Paris police prefecture opened a platform to collect footage filmed by witnesses.
Orasio's System V lets an investigator load all of that material and query it in natural language. “You just make a request as you would in ChatGPT,” co-founder and president Florian Fournier told the paper (translated from French), giving the example of a person in a black balaclava with a green Adidas backpack and white Nike shoes. The software pulls out every matching clip, can follow a vehicle by its number plate or distinctive details, and reconstructs a route from camera locations and timestamps. In some investigations, Fournier said, imported footage added up to the equivalent of 9 years.
What it means in practice
The tool works on clothing and objects, not faces. “No biometric criteria; facial recognition is prohibited on national territory,” Fournier said (translated from French). Identification would then come from the TAJ police records file, which Gérald Darmanin has promised to compare with social-media images using facial recognition. French law still bars algorithmic video surveillance to prevent looting, because that would require biometric detection, which remains forbidden except under narrow exceptions in the European AI Act and Article 9 of the GDPR. Orasio says its products can also plug into live city camera feeds, functions restricted in France but used elsewhere, for instance in Ukraine.
The case shows how quickly security AI moves from defence and cyber projects, such as the Arcadia military AI platform and ENISA's tests of Mistral cybersecurity models, into everyday policing. It also lands as lawmakers debate tighter controls, including LFI bill 3149 on prior authorisation for general-purpose AI.
What to watch: how courts treat evidence assembled with AI video search, whether the CNIL weighs in, and whether the government tries to widen the legal exceptions for facial recognition.