Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to page 9 of the Police reform white paper From Local to National: A New Model for Policing (CP1489), what Artificial Intelligence powered a) tools and b) software to automate manual processes will she roll-out.

The Government is determined to ramp up the responsible use of Artificial Intelligence across policing. We have already begun to support policing to adopt AI responsibly, with over £50 million invested to date in priority areas such as facial recognition technologies, AI enabled audio visual file redaction, and robotic process automation. These technologies are already helping to catch more criminals and make policing more efficient. We will continue progressing this work in the coming years.

We recently announced over £115 million over the next three years to support the rapid and responsible development, testing and rollout of AI tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales.

This will be spearheaded by the creation of Police.AI, a new National Centre for AI in Policing. Whilst specific use cases and tools are still being investigated and developed, in its first year, Police.AI is expected to focus on some of the biggest administrative pressures facing policing. This includes developing and supporting tools to automate tasks such as disclosure, the analysis of CCTV footage, production of case files, crime recording and classification, and the translation and transcription of documents. These tools are expected to save around six million policing hours a year, while improving the speed and quality of service provided to victims and witnesses.

Police.AI will support forces to adopt AI tools and software by testing and assuring AI models, helping with scaling implementation, and providing public facing transparency through a registry of AI tools in use by policing.

This announcement reflects the Government’s commitment to supporting policing to use AI in an evidence based and transparent way to catch more criminals, speed up investigations and free up officers for frontline duties.