{"id":387156,"date":"2026-01-24T01:51:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T01:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/387156\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T01:51:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T01:51:08","slug":"west-midlands-police-admits-overstating-evidence-in-maccabi-tel-aviv-fan-ban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/387156\/","title":{"rendered":"West Midlands Police admits overstating evidence in Maccabi Tel Aviv fan ban"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">West Midlands Police has admitted it &#8220;overstated the evidence&#8221; used to make the decision to ban Israeli fans from a match in Birmingham.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Craig Guildford, its former chief constable, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/c77k670ez6yo\" class=\"ssrcss-6mgqu7-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">retired earlier this month<\/a> after damning criticism of the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the Europa League match against Aston Villa, last November.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In newly released documents, the force also said &#8220;we did not engage early enough with the local Jewish community&#8221;, and indicated there was now a ban on AI use after its evidence included a match that did not take place. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Furthermore, it said its operations would have lasted four days, involved multiple forces, and cost more than \u00a35m, if 2,500 away fans had attended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"West Midlands Police has admitted it &#8220;overstated the evidence&#8221; used to make the decision to ban Israeli fans&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-387156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}