Crime commissioner Simon Foster has been pleading poverty again in a bid to put up local taxes to cover an alleged £41 million ‘black hole’ which would certainly be filled if only he stopped wasting public money.
What may or may not be a waste of money (see Birmingham Council’s Oracle debacle) is the West Midlands Police ‘Synergy’ IT programme on which it spent a little over £1.8 million in November and £3.4 million in October.
You’d at least think it was enough to ensure that, when they Googled for evidence to justifying a ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters attending a match at Villa Park, the results would be trustworthy.
On his humiliating recall to Parliament, Chief Constable Craig Guildford told MPs he stood by his force’s ‘dodgy dossier’ exaggerating the cost of policing a Maccabi Tel Aviv game in Holland, completely inventing one against West Ham and falsely claiming it had consulted local Jewish groups.
So what about WMP’s IT policies? It’s hard to tell, after wading through a 2024 report by Marc Williams, its ‘Head of Architecture’.
It uses the word ‘leverage’ 38 times in 35 pages and you can be certain any official report relying on a word that has to be pronounced in the accent of a Wall Street trader means you’re in for a cold shower of meaningless drivel.
For instance, ‘policing Data has become the apex of focus for untapped potential’ while ‘desktops are being leveraged to provide the niche use-case where the fixed technology makes sense’ and so on.
Even so, maybe Mr Guildford should have waded his way through this gibberish (why are IT people incapable of using plain English?) because it does warn: ‘Trust and Confidence in policing's use of public data is critical.’
Mr Guildford told MPs his force ‘do not use artificial intelligence’ which is interesting because his IT report says: ‘A logical step in the enhancement of Data within policing is the potential to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies.’
Mind you, the report does add: ‘Policing needs to proceed with caution here.’
https://www.expressandstar.com/sport/football/aston-villa/2026/01/06/west-midlands-police-chief-denies-scraping-for-reasons-to-ban-maccabi-tel-aviv-fans-from-aston-villa-match/
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