🚨Sir Mark Rowley has just told me London will be “less safe” by the end of the year because he’ll have to lose 500-700 officers from doing frontline jobs after Sir Sadiq Khan blocked plans to use Palantir AI
Q - You wanted to roll out AI provided by Palantir to try and speed up tasks in the Met like searching through reports, searching through phone data. Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, said, no, that's not happening. You've been blocked from doing it. So what does that mean?
ROWLEY: I'm having to shrink the Metropolitan Police because of our budget, so we've shrunk by 3,300 people in 3 years. We're going to lose another 1,150 people this year. We had a plan to avoid doing any damage to the policing of the streets by using technology to automate behind the scenes, as well as improving what officers could do. Now that's been blocked we're going to be taking between 500 and 700 officers out of frontline services equivalent…. 500 to 700 officers and staff who were part of delivering services to London, maybe from call handling through to street policing, we're going to have to reduce that. That will have an effect on the streets of London. That's why we were trying to do a sort of a sort of rapid tech procurement to make a difference for Londoners.”
SOPHY RIDGE: Will it make London less safe?
SIR MARK ROWLEY: “Well, we're going to be smaller at the end of the year. So it'll be less safe at the end of the year than it was otherwise.”