After repeatedly denying for weeks that his force used AI tools, the chief constable of the West Midlands police has finally admitted that a hugely controversial decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans from the UK did involve hallucinated information from Microsoft Copilot. //

Making it worse was the fact that the West Midlands Police narrative rapidly fell apart. According to the BBC, police claimed that the Amsterdam football match featured “500-600 Maccabi fans [who] had targeted Muslim communities the night before the Amsterdam fixture, saying there had been ‘serious assaults including throwing random members of the public’ into a river. They also claimed that 5,000 officers were needed to deal with the unrest in Amsterdam, after previously saying that the figure was 1,200.”

Amsterdam police made clear that the West Midlands account of bad Maccabi fan behavior was highly exaggerated, and the BBC recently obtained a letter from the Dutch inspector general confirming that the claims were inaccurate.

But it was one flat-out error—a small one, really—that has made the West Midlands Police recommendation look particularly shoddy. In a list of recent games with Maccabi Tel Aviv fans present, the police included a match between West Ham (UK) and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The only problem? No such match occurred.