{"id":442809,"date":"2026-02-24T10:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T10:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/442809\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T10:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T10:23:09","slug":"its-not-robocop-uk-police-embrace-ai-efficiency-in-complex-investigations-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/442809\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It\u2019s not Robocop\u2019: UK police embrace AI \u2018efficiency\u2019 in complex investigations | Police"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was fraud on a grand scale. The \u201cFuck the Police\u201d criminal gang based in Luton and Romania stole \u00a3800,000 in more than 3,000 withdrawals from cash machines in dozens of locations throughout 2024.<\/p>\n

The police investigation matched the crime in its complexity. When detectives in Bedfordshire<\/a> seized the suspects\u2019 two dozen smartphones, they were faced with a mountain of potential digital evidence \u2013 1.4 terabytes of information, according to the authorities, connecting co-conspirators across eastern England and the Bacau region of Romania.<\/p>\n

Alongside human intelligence, forensics and the other mainstays of traditional policing, detectives increasingly face dauntingly vast reservoirs of digital information that could contain vital clues.<\/p>\n

The data haul, which covered messages, geolocation positions, emails, notes and photographs, was equivalent to about 500,000 ebooks and would ordinarily take months, if not years, to comb through.<\/p>\n

It was then that the detectives of the Eastern Region Special Operations Unit reached for new AI tools, supplied by the controversial US tech company Palantir, co-founded by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel<\/a>. Palantir has more than \u00a3500m in high-profile contracts with the NHS and the Ministry of Defence. But it is also providing AI investigation tools to 11 police forces, and the government last month pledged<\/a> to invest more than \u00a3115m in the \u201crapid and responsible development, testing and rollout of AI tools\u201d across all 43 forces in England and Wales, including creating Police.AI: a new national centre for AI in policing.<\/p>\n

In the cashpoint case, the AI system \u2013 known as Nectar \u2013 unlocked the trove. It read and translated more than 100,000 messages, drew charts connecting suspects, analysed their movements, combed pictures and texts for suggestions of crimes and alerted detectives to potential leads. Human policing led to the arrests which then saw six men jailed in November, but without the AI, the detectives would still be digging through the evidence mountain now, the force said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not Robocop,\u201d said Dan James, the programme manager at the unit. \u201cIt\u2019s about how we can make our investigators more efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the use of Palantir\u2019s AI technology in policing has caused concern. Last year, documents showed<\/a> the intention was to \u201cassist with decision making\u201d and \u201caid in the prevention, detection and investigation of crimes\u201d. Data the AI system processed included political and religious opinions. Last week, Shockat Adam, the MP for Leicester South called on ministers to provide greater transparency about another Palantir contract with Leicestershire police, which he called \u201cdystopian\u201d. The Lib Dem MP Martin Wrigley called for UK AI companies to be encouraged to bid for police AI contracts and Liberty, the civil liberties campaign group, has called for the government to install \u201ca system of strong guardrails\u201d before police forces deploy more AI.<\/p>\n

The use of Palantir\u2019s AI technology in policing has caused concern. Photograph: Juan marcos borsatto\/Alamy<\/p>\n

For Bedfordshire police, the most immediate benefit offered by its Palantir-enabled system in the cash point case was the translation of the phones\u2019 contents from the suspects\u2019 native Romanian.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe did 100,000 messages in a day,\u201d said an official, requesting anonymity. \u201cWe would have been waiting weeks, if not months for that translation to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Human translation would have cost \u00a330,000, and in the time taken to complete the translation, suspects in custody might have been bailed, released under investigation or absconded from the country, requiring re-arrests.<\/p>\n

The AI system scanned texts for clues about other crimes and, in the cashpoint case, it identified about 120 potential offences. \u201cIf they\u2019re talking about drugs, they\u2019re talking about ATMs, if they\u2019re talking about guns [the AI] highlights them,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

The AI is trained to recognise images of cocaine and cannabis and reads all the texts and messages in a phone and tries to \u201cunderstand them against UK law\u201d. The technology is also able to help detectives put together a more accurate picture of suspects\u2019 movements than would otherwise be possible, but the officials declined to elaborate on how this was done.<\/p>\n

The system also creates live association charts \u2013 not dissimilar to photo pinboards familiar from TV dramas \u2013 that are constantly updated as new information arrives.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re able to click on [a person and see they are] linked to that person through this and it explains why,\u201d said James. \u201cIt\u2019s really efficient and it stays up to date.\u201d<\/p>\n

At present, the AI tools are only used for investigation and AI outputs are not used directly in prosecutions, although that is a goal that could be achieved in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople could be lazy and people will get lazy,\u201d said James. \u201cSo we need to make sure that \u2026 the AI\u2019s suggestion is affirmed by a person.\u201d<\/p>\n

The force said Palantir does not hold or have access to any of its data and its AI tools cannot learn from it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was fraud on a grand scale. The \u201cFuck the Police\u201d criminal gang based in Luton and Romania…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-442809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442809","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=442809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}