A preliminary review by Britain’s HMIC (His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary) confirmed that the force’s intelligence gathering suffered from “confirmation bias” and included multiple factual inaccuracies. Among the most serious errors was reference to a non-existent football fixture, which was later acknowledged not to have come from verified policing intelligence or open-source reporting, but from an AI-generated output produced using Microsoft Copilot.
Britain’s West Midlands chief constable later acknowledged that the error originated from Copilot rather than verified intelligence or conventional open-source research (Google). This matters because Copilot does not verify facts; it generates plausible-sounding text based on probability. When such output is accepted as intelligence without independent verification, the result is not a minor mistake but a collapse of evidentiary discipline.
In evidence initially given to British MPs, the chief constable suggested the erroneous information had been identified via a conventional Google search. He later corrected this account, explaining in a formal letter to the British Home Affairs Committee that the information was in fact produced through the use of Microsoft Copilot, an AI tool designed to generate text based on probabilistic pattern matching rather than factual verification.
This distinction is not trivial. Copilot does not “check” facts in the way human analysts or vetted intelligence sources do; it predicts plausible outputs based on training data. When such outputs are not independently verified, they can fabricate convincing but entirely false information—as occurred here. The inclusion of AI-generated fiction in a report used to inform a public safety decision represents a profound failure of professional standards and internal safeguards.
That failure fully justifies scrutiny of leadership and process.
The term “confirmation bias,” as used by Britain’s policing watchdog (HIMC), does not mean hostility toward a particular group. It refers to a well-documented cognitive error in which decision-makers:form:
- an initial assumption or hypothesis, and then
- give disproportionate weight to information that appears to support it, while
- discounting, overlooking, or failing to rigorously test contradictory evidence.
In this case, confirmation bias meant that once Britain’s West Midlands Police force had identified Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters as a potential risk, insufficient scepticism was applied to material that appeared to reinforce that view, including unverified AI-generated content. The bias lay not in the existence of concern, but in the failure to adequately test the quality and provenance of evidence used to justify it.
Importantly, confirmation bias describes a process failure, not proof that the underlying risk assessment was invented or malicious.
While these procedural failures are serious, the political response has been unusually escalatory. The British Home Secretary publicly withdrew confidence in the chief constable before the conclusion of the parliamentary inquiry, and the episode was rapidly framed as a matter of “national importance.”
At the same time, prominent pro-Israel communal organisations moved rapidly to demand the chief constable’s dismissal (the Board of Deputies of British Jews called for him to be dismissed without delay). These interventions occurred within a well-documented context where organised pro-Israel advocacy groups maintain longstanding, open, and well-documented relationships across the British political establishment. Acknowledging this does not imply conspiracy; it reflects normal lobbying dynamics in Britain’s Westminster. However, it does help explain why scrutiny in this case has been unusually intense, narrowly focused, personalised, and politically charged — particularly when compared with responses to other serious policing failures. i.e.,
Hillsborough Disaster – A mass-fatality disaster involving evidence manipulation did not provoke instant ministerial declarations of lost confidence in police leadership. No immediate dismissal of the chief constable at the time, No Home Secretary publicly withdrew confidence during the initial revelations, and accountability took over 20 years, driven by victims’ families—not ministerial intervention.
Stephen Lawrence & Metropolitan Police - A finding of institutional racism across the UK’s largest police force did not trigger the same rapid, personalised political escalation. No immediate sacking of the Met Commissioner, reform recommendations were gradual and structural, and Ministers did not frame the issue as a sudden crisis of confidence in leadership.
The result has been a public narrative in which the collapse of a flawed police report is treated not merely as an institutional error, but as proof that the original risk assessment itself was illegitimate.
The collapse of the West Midlands Police report has increasingly been used to suggest that concerns about Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were wholly unfounded or motivated by prejudice. That conclusion does not follow from the evidence.
Independent and verifiable sources—including UEFA disciplinary proceedings—show that Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters have, on multiple occasions, been sanctioned for racist or discriminatory behaviour. These are formal findings by football’s governing body, not speculative claims. They demonstrate that concerns about supporter behaviour were not conjured from thin air, even though the police failed to evidence those concerns properly in this instance. These findings do not excuse poor intelligence handling, but they do undermine the claim that police concern were illegitimate and arose from nothing. The current political framing risks replacing/substituting one form of confirmation bias with another - reverse confirmation bias which assumes that because the report was flawed, all underlying concern must have been baseless. Thus serving political reassurance rather than public safety. Public-order policing requires evidence-based assessment, not narrative absolution. The appropriate response to this episode is to demand higher evidentiary standards—not to erase documented patterns of supporter misconduct because acknowledging them is politically sensitive.
This case raises urgent questions for all of Britain’s police forces:
- Are AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot being used elsewhere in intelligence preparation, briefings, or risk assessments?
- What safeguards exist to prevent AI-generated fabrications from entering official records?
- Is there any audit trail or disclosure requirement when AI tools are used?
Most seriously, the episode raises questions about past criminal cases. If AI-generated material has been used—directly or indirectly—in intelligence logs, surveillance justifications, charging decisions, or risk assessments, then the integrity of previous convictions may be open to challenge. Generative AI is not designed to meet evidential standards, and its unregulated use risks contaminating the justice process itself.
Conclusion
This case establishes two separates but connected failures:
- A policing failure, in which unverified AI-generated content from Microsoft Copilot was accepted into an intelligence product, compounded by confirmation bias and weak oversight.
- A political failure, in which that policing error has been leveraged—under sustained establishment pressure—to advance a one-sided narrative that shields certain actors from scrutiny while treating procedural failure as proof of moral innocence.
The lessons are clear:
💡 Accountability must be consistent.
💡AI tools must never substitute for verified intelligence.
💡 AI-generated content must never be treated as fact without rigorous verification.
💡 Policing accountability must be applied consistently—not intensified or softened from the disproportionate influence of well-connected interest groups— but insulated accordingly, regardless of the political sensitivities involved,
💡 Public institutions must not allow political pressure to transform due process into theatre.
💡 Decisions must be grounded in evidence.
💡 Tested against bias in all directions.
Until transparent national rules govern the use of generative AI in policing, the risk is not merely reputational. It is judicial
⏩ Cam Ogie is a Gaelic games enthusiast.
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