After repeatedly denying for weeks that his force used AI tools, the chief constable of the West Midlands police has finally admitted that a hugely controversial decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans from the UK did involve hallucinated information from Microsoft Copilot.
In October 2025, Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) met to decide whether an upcoming football match between Aston Villa (based in Birmingham) and Maccabi Tel Aviv could be held safely.
Tensions were heightened in part due to an October 2 terror attack against a synagogue in Manchester where several people were killed by an Islamic attacker.
West Midlands Police, who were a key member of the SAG, argued that the upcoming football match could lead to violence in Birmingham, and they recommended banning fans from the game. The police pointed specifically to claims that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans had been violent in a recent football match in Amsterdam.
This decision was hugely controversial, and it quickly became political. To some Jews and conservatives, it looked like Jewish fans were being banned from the match even though Islamic terror attacks were the more serious source of violence. The football match went ahead on November 6 without fans, but the controversy around the ban has persisted for months.
Making it worse was the fact that the West Midlands Police narrative rapidly fell apart. According to the BBC, police claimed that the Amsterdam football match featured “500-600 Maccabi fans [who] had targeted Muslim communities the night before the Amsterdam fixture, saying there had been ‘serious assaults including throwing random members of the public’ into a river. They also claimed that 5,000 officers were needed to deal with the unrest in Amsterdam, after previously saying that the figure was 1,200.”