Topic
Data, algorithms and artificial intelligence in operational policing.
7 articles · All topics →
Surveys tell us whether public confidence in the police rose or fell. This dataset shows the language that ran alongside it — a quarter-century of UK news headlines about the police, reduced to words, tone and themes. The two curves turn out not to be the same shape.
Alex Murray spent a career investigating murders and running counter-terrorism operations, then built the institution that asked British policing a harder question: does any of this actually work? A profile of the founder of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing.
Artificial intelligence is reaching policing faster than most leaders were ever trained to understand it. A plain-English guide that builds from the basics — what the words mean, what AI can and can't do, how it uses your data, the risks to own, and where it genuinely helps.
In June 2026 the government launched PoliceAI, a national centre to develop and scale artificial intelligence across the 43 forces of England and Wales. This is a working guide for leaders — what the institution is, the platforms underneath it, and the questions worth asking before any of it reaches your force. Built to grow as the picture does.
A London beat officer turned Philadelphia professor, Jerry Ratcliffe spent a career arguing that policing should aim its scarce resources at the few places, times and people that produce most of the harm — and then test whether it worked. A profile of the criminologist behind intelligence-led policing and the Reducing Crime podcast.
A CIA-seeded American data firm has moved from the edge of UK public-sector IT to a structural position inside defence, health and, increasingly, policing. What has actually been bought, what the software does, and why it is contested.
Every image and video in this article is fictional and AI-generated for illustration. John Smith, Margaret Doyle and Wessex Police do not exist, and no real person or event is depicted. A short case study in how cheaply CCTV can now be faked — and what an investigator has to do to keep a manipulated clip out of the file.
