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What’s happened here, then?
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has pulled a power move. Literally.
What did that involve?
She’s giving herself the ability to sack chief constables – a power that has, for the past 15 years, been solely held by Police and Crime Commissioners.
You mean the ones that are being scrapped?
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Correct – Mahmood destroyed the PCCs and is now absorbing their power, like some sort of mad Doctor Who villain.
In this case, though, she’s making the move for one very specific reason.
Last November, Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned from travelling to Birmingham for their team’s match against Aston Villa by a safety advisory group who followed intelligence from West Midlands Police.
That decision was heavily criticised at the time, with accusations the police were swayed by antisemitic sentiment from some in the local community who were opposed to Israeli visitors.
What has happened since then?
Things have only got weirder.
Mahmood asked Sir Andy Cooke, the chief inspector of constabulary, to investigate what led West Midlands Police to reach its conclusions, and that report landed today.
It found that the force correctly recognised it was a ‘high-risk fixture’, but that it was ‘not paying enough attention to important matters of detail, including at the most senior levels’.
However, there are other details in the Sir Andy’s report that are more… eye-catching.
For example, the intelligence provided to the group by the police included an assertion that the most recent match played by Maccabi Tel Aviv in the UK was against West Ham on November 9 2023.
There was no such match. It’s since emerged that this was an AI hallucination that popped up when officers used Microsoft Copilot to search social media.
Chief Constable Craig Guildford told the police inspectorate his force didn’t use AI to compile their assessment, and he later told the Home Affairs Committee the same thing.
In a letter sent to Committee today, he acknowledged he had been incorrect both times.
Not been a great week for AI, has it?
Between this and all the horrific non-consensual sexual pictures being pumped out by Elon Musk’s Grok, no it hasn’t.
It’s a reminder, if needed, that you can trust a reliable and verifiable source better than a robot that scrapes any old nonsense from the internet. Long live proper journalism!
Back to the matter at hand…
Yes – speaking in the House of Commons yesterday afternoon, Mahmood said she had lost confidence in Craig Guildford as the chief constable of West Midlands Police.
He is now facing calls to resign – something that he’s resisted so far, something that even Wes Streeting has laid into him about this morning.
The Health Secretary told Times Radio: ‘I genuinely thought that, having misled Parliament, that having misled the public, and having had one of his own local MPs, the Home Secretary, saying she had lost confidence in him, I honestly thought that anyone with integrity would at that point say, ‘I have to resign’.
‘The fact he hasn’t, I really think, is a stain on his character that, if he doesn’t act quickly, he won’t be able to remove.
‘I hope he does the right thing. I will be horrified if he is still in post at the end of the day.’
But despite her newly announced power grab, only Simon Foster – the police and crime commissioner for the region – is currently able to sack Guildford.
Needless to say, it’s not ideal to be a police chief without the confidence of the Home Secretary. He may be having a scroll of Indeed as you read this.
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