The PoliceAI national centre intended to coordinate the adoption of artificial intelligence across policing in England and Wales has been formally launched.
The body, which has evolved from the National Police Chiefs' Council's (NPCC) existing AI portfolio, will employ around 50 staff combining policing experience with AI expertise, and will work on behalf of all 43 forces in England and Wales to identify, test and roll out AI tools and training. It is hosted by the College of Policing and has been allocated £75m of Home Office funding over three years.
The NPCC says the centre will concentrate initially on areas where it believes AI can deliver the most immediate benefit. Projects already underway include a tool to prepare and quality-check evidential case files, with pilots beginning this year ahead of a planned national rollout in 2027; technology to identify and categorise child sexual abuse images, intended to reduce officers' exposure to harmful material; and tools to analyse CCTV and other digital media to help detectives identify investigative leads earlier.
The centre also hosts the PoliceAI Threat Hub (PATH), which coordinates policing's response to criminal misuse of AI, including deepfake image abuse, and will deliver detection tools and training to forces.
A key feature of the centre's approach will be public-facing register of how forces use AI is in development, with a first version expected in the autumn. Interim director Alex Murray OBE, a former temporary chief constable and National Crime Agency threat director, said the centre's work was "rooted in transparency" and committed to explaining how chosen tools work, how they are evaluated, and the safeguards in place, to support public confidence.
Speaking at the launch, Mr Murray said the centre was open to working with any AI supplier, including Palantir, whose £50m contract with the Metropolitan Police has been the subject of a high-profile dispute, provided its tools were both effective and responsible: "if it's effective but not responsible, it's not transparent, explainable, robust, then we're not interested". The centre has set itself a target of saving six million hours of police time by the end of 2028.
The NPCC says safeguards will ensure human judgement and decision-making remain central to all use cases. Police processing of personal data for law enforcement purposes falls under Part 3 of the DPA 2018, which imposes its own requirements on automated decision-making, data protection impact assessments and logging; how the register and evaluation documentation interact with those obligations, and with forces' FOIA duties, remains to be seen.
The launch forms part of the police reform agenda set out in the government's Police Reform White Paper, published in January 2026, and the centre is expected to become part of the planned National Policing Service.
NPCC chair Chief Constable Gavin Stephens described the centre as "a real opportunity to harness new technology for the public good", while College of Policing chief executive Sir Andy Marsh cautioned that "technology alone is never enough", saying it must be guided by strong leadership and grounded in the Code of Ethics.
