London's Metropolitan Police has warned that the capital will be less safe by the end of the year, as budget pressure forces the force to cut staff and a key technology plan is blocked. The force's commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, set out the warning while discussing the challenges facing the Met. He linked the situation both to financial constraints and to a decision that has stopped the force from rolling out new technology. The result, he indicated, would be felt directly on the streets of London.
At the centre of the dispute is a plan to bring artificial intelligence into the force's day to day work. The commissioner said the Met wanted to roll out AI, with the technology provided by the company Palantir, to speed up tasks within the force. He gave the examples of searching through reports and searching through phone data, work that currently takes up significant time. The idea was to use automation to handle some of that behind the scenes effort.
That plan, however, has been stopped. According to the commissioner, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, said no, and the force has been blocked from going ahead with it. Rowley said the Met now faces tough choices as a result of that decision. The block, in his account, removes a tool the force had been counting on to protect frontline policing while its resources shrink.
The backdrop to the decision is a steady reduction in the size of the force. The commissioner said the Met is having to shrink because of its budget, and set out the scale of the change. The force has already shrunk by 3,300 people over three years, he said, and has to lose another 1,150 people this year. Those reductions form the financial pressure shaping the current choices.
The technology plan, Rowley explained, had been designed to soften the impact of those cuts. The aim was to avoid doing damage to the policing of the streets by using technology to automate work behind the scenes, as well as improving what officers could do. By taking on routine tasks through automation, the force hoped to keep officers focused on visible policing. With that plan now blocked, the commissioner said, that protection has been lost.
As a consequence, the force says it will have to reduce frontline numbers. The commissioner said the Met would be taking between 500 and 700 officers and staff out of frontline services. He described these as people who are part of delivering services to London, ranging from call handling through to street policing. Removing them, he said, would have an effect on the streets of the capital.
Asked directly whether this would make London less safe, the commissioner did not avoid the conclusion. He said the force would be smaller at the end of the year, and that it would therefore be less safe at the end of the year than it would otherwise have been. To try to limit the damage, he said the Met is attempting a rapid technology procurement to make a difference for London. Even so, his assessment left little doubt that the combination of budget cuts and the blocked plan would weigh on the force's capacity.