Chief Constable of West Midland Police admits AI was used to compile faulty intelligence report – having assured MPs repeatedly that it wasn’t!
How serious can it be if you use AI at work and it ‘hallucinates’ an answer that isn’t actually true? Well, that’s what we’re finding out after an extraordinary admission by the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police.
Photo by Alfonso Scarpa / Unsplash
In November last year, fans of football team Maccabi Tel Aviv were banned from attending a match with Aston Villa held in Birmingham. The decision to ban them was made by Birmingham City Council’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG), based on accounts of previous unrest and violence cited in an intelligence report prepared by West Midlands Police.
It has since turned out that this report referenced events at a football match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham that never actually took place.
Earlier this week, Dutch police also questioned the credibility of accounts of violence at a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax. That match did take place in November 2024 and some violence was involved, but Dutch police say the report exaggerated the scale and impact.
Now Chief Constable Craig Guildford has admitted in a letter to MPs that the erroneous information was the result of using the AI app Microsoft Copilot in preparing the report. The admission is especially striking because he had repeatedly told MPs that AI was not used.
‘We stand by the key tenets in the document,’ he told the Home Affairs Select Committee on December 1, but admitted that some ‘social media scraping’ had been involved as part of the information gathering, which he admitted, ‘is wrong.’
Asked specifically if AI had been used, he responded: ‘No, not at all. We do a very comprehensive assessment.’
‘We do not use AI,’ he told the same committee on January 6, claiming that the erroneous information contained in the report had been the result of ‘a Google search.’
Today, the Chief Constable has written to Dame Karen Brady, chair of the committee, admitting that he has since learned that, ‘that the erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot.’
He apologised, adding that in giving evidence to the committee that AI had not been used, ‘My belief that this was the case was honestly held and there was no intention to mislead the Committee.’
But the Chief Constable has already been under pressure over the errors contained in the report. ‘The Chief Constable’s position is untenable,’ said Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch in a post on social media site X just last week.
‘His position is untenable,’ agreed Lord Mann, the government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, told the BBC in response to the new admission. ‘But it’s much deeper than him. What he’s been doing is covering for the mistakes lower down…’
We shall see how things unfold…
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