West Midlands Police has admitted it overstated the evidence used to make the decision to ban Israeli fans from a match in Birmingham. Craig Guildford, its former chief constable, retired earlier this month after damning criticism of the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the Europa League match against Aston Villa, last November. In newly released documents, the force also said we did not engage early enough with the local Jewish community, and indicated there was now a ban on AI use after its evidence included a match that did not take place. Furthermore, it said its operations would have lasted four days, involved multiple forces, and cost more than £5m, if 2,500 away fans had attended. The documents were released ahead of a public meeting on Tuesday, at which Police and Crime Commissioner for the West Midlands, Simon Foster, will discuss at his accountability and governance board, the decision to ban the Maccabi fans.

The chief constable of West Midlands Police has retired after damning criticism of a decision to ban Israeli fans from a match against Aston Villa. Craig Guildford's retirement was confirmed on Friday after both Downing Street and the home secretary said this week they had lost confidence in his leadership. He faced numerous calls to resign after apologising for providing incorrect evidence to MPs, which included the denial that AI was used in a report which led to the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the game on 6 November. Announcing his retirement, Guildford, 52, did not offer an apology and blamed what he described as the political and media frenzy for his decision to step down. I have carefully considered my position and concluded that retirement is in the best interests of the organisation, myself and my family, he said.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says she has lost confidence in West Midlands Police's chief constable after Israeli football fans were banned from a match against Aston Villa. Mahmood told MPs a damning review from the policing watchdog over the intelligence that led to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being banned showed a failure of leadership. The force has apologised saying it did not deliberately distort evidence that was used by Birmingham's Safety Advisory Group for the 6 November game . Chief Constable Craig Guildford remains in post, but faces a meeting on 27 January to be questioned by Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster who has the authority to sack him. Mahmood told the Commons on Wednesday she intended to restore the power for home secretaries to dismiss chief constables who fail their communities.

When a police force is supposed to seek the truth and uphold the law, what happens when the evidence they present to officials and the public is, as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood put it, exaggerated or untrue? The police inspectorate has concluded the leaders of West Midlands Police fell foul of confirmation bias. In simple terms, that means senior officers had already reached a decision and were looking for intelligence to justify it. The list of errors and inaccuracies set out in an independent review of the decision-making that led to fans of Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv being banned from attending a fixture at Villa Park in November have been described by Mahmood as damning. They include: A report of a football match in an intelligence report produced using AI which never happened; a twice-repeated denial by senior police leaders to MPs that AI had not been relied on to produce the inaccurate report; the claim that local Jewish groups had been consulted on the move when they had not been; inaccurately presenting evidence from Dutch police reports from a previous fixture involving the club.

West Midlands Police has defended keeping silent over the significant hooliganism among Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, which it now confirms is the reason they were banned from attending the Europa League clash with Aston Villa. More than 700 officers from 20 police forces were deployed near Villa Park on Thursday, where hundreds took part in demonstrations over the controversial decision. When it emerged in October that fans of the Israeli club would not be welcome, senior MPs, including Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, said it amounted to antisemitism. Jack Angelides, CEO of Maccabi Tel Aviv, told the BBC their fans being banned meant it was time for some introspection and retrospection. Chief Constable Craig Guildford has been asked to appear before The Home Affairs Committee to explain the reasoning behind the ban, by Birmingham's Safety Advisory Group.

West Midlands Police (WMP) is the second-largest Police Force in the UK, covering the cities of Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, equivalent to 348 square miles (900 square kilometres). It sees its mission as working to create a safer community for the 2.8 million citizens it serves, preventing crime and helping those in need. As with any major Police Force, WMP deals with a lot of data, which increases through every interaction it has with the public, from the 2000 emergency calls it receives daily to the work cases officers handle on the streets. This is all now being handled a lot better after work from enterprise data cloud specialists Cloudera working with Accenture, who have created one new core data hub, the Data Driven Insights Project. Being creative and thinking of new approaches to achieve this is one of its key internal values, its Director of IT and Digital, Helen Davis, believes-and its new'Data Driven Insights Project' is a perfect example of just such thinking.

A flagship artificial intelligence system designed to predict gun and knife violence in the UK before it happens had serious flaws that made it unusable, local police have admitted. The error led to large drops in accuracy, and the system was ultimately rejected by all of the experts reviewing it for ethical problems. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. The prediction system, known as Most Serious Violence (MSV), is part of the UK's National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS) project. The Home Office has funded NDAS with at least £10 million ($13 million) during the past two years, with the aim to create machine learning systems that can be used across England and Wales.

A flagship artificial intelligence system designed to predict gun and knife violence before it happens had serious flaws that made it unusable, police have admitted. The error led to large drops in accuracy and the system was ultimately rejected by all of the experts reviewing it for ethical problems. The prediction system, known as Most Serious Violence (MSV), is part of the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS) project. The Home Office has funded NDAS with at least £10 million during the last two years with the aim to create machine learning systems that can be used across England and Wales. As a result of the failure of MSV, police have stopped developing the prediction system in its current form.

Fingerprints, DNA and CCTV were all resisted when they were introduced as crime-fighting tools, so it's no surprise that self-appointed experts are making a fuss about the use of artificial intelligence by police, writes Tom Wood. Following the theme of'Groundhog Day' in our political world, I was drawn to a recent story about an ongoing battle to block technological advances in profiling and crime prevention on ethical grounds. West Midlands Police, on behalf of English forces, is trialling a scheme called the National Analytics Solution, which will use cutting-edge artificial intelligence to analyse data with a view to predicting crime hotspots and offending patterns. After all, it's only a'techie' way of doing what local police collators have been doing for 100 years. At a basic level, it's common sense, most crime is petty and committed by young men, therefore the more young men in your community, the more crime.

A significant step on the road towards the UK becoming "an inevitable dystopian hellscape", is how one article characterised the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS) project being run by the West Midlands Police. Another headline claimed that it marks a "descent into state surveillance". One publication asked whether "Minority Report is now a reality", while another site described the scheme as "Minority Report-lite", and yet another called NDAS "the real Minority Report". Style magazine Dazed at least mixed things up a bit in terms of its cinematic references, suggesting that the project had "Robocop vibes". Even the website of celebrity conspiracy theorist David Icke was moved to post about the programme, labelling UK law enforcement as "the thought police".