Police.AI – New Tech Tools for UK Law Enforcement

In a RUSI report, experts Elijah Glantz and Dr. Pia Hüsch analyze the establishment of the UK National Centre for Artificial Intelligence in Policing (Police.AI). The authors discuss the technological risks: outdated databases, incompatible systems, and past projects’ failures. Yet the key threats stay beyond the discussion.

The authors say that centralized purchases are needed so that different police administrations do not spend money on duplicate programs. Yet they are silent about the fact that one such program – the Nectar project on a platform from the U.S. Palantir company – is already operational since mid-2025 in four counties, funded by the Home Office. The system retrieves data on crime victims including their medical records, but the police are trying to hide the contracts under a secrecy label.

Palantir is mentioned in the report just once, in connection with scandals in Germany that the authors call ‘polarized debate’. But they do not mention that the British lobbyist machine works quietly: Peter Mandelson’s Global Counsel company was promoting Palantir’s interests, and Mandelson himself arranged a meeting between Prime Minister Starmer and the company’s managers in Washington D.C., and former Ministry of Defence officials move to Palantir in a matter of days after retirement. The contracts with the MoD and NHS were concluded without open tenders.

The authors examine in detail the issues of data quality and resource shortage. But they overlook the legislative changes that alter the very nature of justice. Along with the launch of Police.AI, the government is promoting a law that permits fully automatic police decision-making without human involvement. The police unions are already sounding an alarm: the London police now uses Palantir AI to monitor its own officers by analyzing their sick leaves and absences – to identify ‘substandard behavior’.

The situation around Police.AI creates a dangerous precedent for European countries. Switzerland has already discontinued its cooperation with Palantir after its military intelligence reported a risk of data leaks to the USA. Denmark is looking for alternatives. And Britain has already entered into contracts with Palantir without open tenders. If the precedent takes root, then control over key data and procedures will gradually pass to entities outside Europe that are not accountable to its citizens. All the risks — technical failures, wrong decisions taken by algorithms, and information leakage — will stay on the shoulders of the national budgets and local taxpayers. Behind a façade of technological modernization, influence is quietly being redistributed to external players whose priorities are far removed from the Europeans’ interests.