UK POLICE AI CHIEF SAYS CRIME TECH HAS BIAS-Alex Murray hopes £115m police AI centre can limit unfairness in tools

A UK police chief has admitted artificial intelligence used to boost crime fighting will contain bias, but pledged to combat the risks.

Labour wants an expansion of police use of AI within England and Wales, with police chiefs also believing it could help keep law enforcement up to date with new criminal threats.

However, Alex Murray has stated that a new national police AI centre would recognise the risks of bias and minimise them.

Bias in the use of AI in policing could result in instances where algorithms – often trained on historical data reflecting past human prejudices – systematically produce unfair outcomes, such as overtargeting minority communities or misidentifying individuals based on race, gender, or socioeconomic status.

Examples of bias have already surfaced in the police use of retrospective facial recognition, which is powered by AI. That is where a suspect is compared with a database of images after a crime.

The new national AI centre, costing £115m, would aim to reduce bias, said Murray, as well as assess and decide what products from private suppliers work. He added that across a range of crimes and challenges facing policing, AI ranged from being a help to a gamechanger, but a human police officer will have to make the final decisions about what to do about the results AI produces.