Law reform charity JUSTICE has warned that police forces in England and Wales risk drifting into an ‘AI wild west’ without urgent regulatory reform.
The government’s AI Opportunities Action Plan aims to ‘turbocharge’ adoption to save millions of officer hours. However, the research argues that the current fragmented approach leaves the public vulnerable to unsafe and unlawful technologies.
Under the existing ‘43-force model’, chief constables retain operational independence over procurement. This creates a ‘postcode lottery’, subjecting citizens in neighbouring areas to vastly different surveillance standards without mandatory national safety or efficacy benchmarks.
Drawing on international evidence, the report highlights a ‘validation gap’ where forces may purchase ineffective tools based on marketing rather than evidence. It points to the ‘Banjo’ scandal in Utah, where the state signed a $20.7 million contract for a crime-detection system that audits later revealed did not possess the advertised AI capabilities.
Similarly, the acoustic gunshot detection system ShotSpotter (now SoundThinking) faces scrutiny. Despite widespread adoption, cities including Chicago, Houston, and Little Rock have moved to cancel contracts in 2024 and 2025, citing high costs and low operational return.
Concerns extend to the integrity of criminal evidence, particularly with the introduction of generative AI tools like Axon’s ‘Draft One’, which uses body-worn camera audio to write police reports. In the US, King County prosecutors recently issued a moratorium on AI-drafted narratives due to the risk of ‘hallucinations’ fabricating details that could corrupt the chain of evidence.
Domestically, the report echoes Amnesty International’s 2025 investigation, Automated Racism. That research found that predictive policing tools trained on historical arrest data risk reproducing and ‘supercharging’ discrimination against minority communities. This comes as the Home Office funds a major expansion of Live Facial Recognition units, despite the lack of a specific statutory framework governing their use.
To address this ‘structural gap’, JUSTICE calls for the creation of a statutory Independent Central Body empowered to set mandatory technical standards and enforce compliance through a ‘Kitemark’ system. Crucially, the report calls for new laws to govern biometrics, ensuring that the boundaries of state surveillance are set by Parliament rather than internal police policy.
In the report’s foreword, Lord John Thomas of Cwmgiedd warns that ‘the cost of inaction is too high,’ urging immediate structural reform to prevent a future of ‘automated injustice’.
