January 15 – West Midlands Police has offered a belated apology to Members of Parliament in the UK after it emerged that its intelligence around banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from Villa Park was not just wrong, but clumsily wrong, produced through the careless use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Chief Constable Craig Guildford admitted the force had misled the Home Affairs Select Committee by presenting a fictitious match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham United as part of its risk assessment. That match never existed. Yet it found its way into police intelligence and, ultimately, into a decision that helped justify banning away fans from the November 6 Europa League tie.
On Monday, Guildford told MPs the error “arose as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot”, contradicting his earlier claim that no AI tools had been involved and that the mistake was down to “one individual doing one Google search”.
In an email to the committee, Guildford attempted to explain the confusion.
“Both Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) Mike O’Hara and I had, up until Friday afternoon, understood that the West Ham United match had only been identified through the use of Google,” he wrote.
“I would like to offer my profound apology to the Committee for this error, both on behalf of myself and that of ACC O’Hara.”
He added, “I had understood and been advised that the match had been identified by way of a Google search in preparation for attending HAC. My belief that this was the case was honestly held, and there was no intention to mislead the Committee.”
The problem is not just that AI was used, but how poorly it was used and then explained. A fictional fixture generated by an AI tool was treated as credible intelligence, passed through internal checks, shared with a council-led safety advisory group, and allowed to influence a high-profile policing decision.
This episode lands as the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, prepares to address MPs on the findings of a report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary into the ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters.
Guildford insists there was no bad faith, but honesty is not the same as competence. What this case exposes is a worrying looseness around AI use inside policing, where tools designed to assist research are allowed to generate unchecked “facts”, and where senior officers appear unclear about how those tools are being deployed at all.
AI may be moving quickly, but policing decisions still carry real-world consequences. This was not a harmless typo. It was a made-up match, used in a serious public order assessment, and only corrected after the damage was done.
Contact the writer of this story, Nick Webster, at [email protected]