AI to review police evidence under disclosure reforms

TL;DR:

• The Home Office will legislate to allow AI to review and summarise evidence, accepting key recommendations from Jonathan Fisher KC’s independent disclosure review.
• Current guidance dates from 1996; some investigations now hold over 500,000 e-books worth of data and the average fraud case runs to more than 4 million documents.
• PoliceAI will pilot automatic summary tools, with a view to scaling across all forces in 2027.

The government has committed to putting AI inside the criminal disclosure process, accepting recommendations from Jonathan Fisher KC’s Independent Review of Disclosure and Fraud Offences — including legislating to allow AI to review evidence. This is a defined workflow change rather than another pilot announcement: officers who currently process and write a summary for every potentially relevant file will be able to use technology to identify, sort and compile them.

Rules written before the smartphone

The scale problem is the government’s central argument. The guidance governing evidence management was introduced in 1996, when a case file often fitted in a single box and neither Google, Facebook nor WhatsApp existed. Today some investigations hold more than 500,000 e-books worth of data, and an average fraud case contains over 4 million documents. The Policing Productivity Review estimated officers spent roughly 532,000 hours in 2022/23 on disclosure work and case files the CPS later assessed as requiring no further action.

Backed by £75 million, PoliceAI — the National Centre for Police AI — will pilot tools that automatically summarise digital material, with a view to scaling across all forces in 2027. The government expects it to free an estimated 6 million hours of police time a year by 2028, equivalent to 3,000 extra officers.

Policing minister Sarah Jones said officers are “wasting thousands of hours trawling through phones, emails, messages, videos and cloud storage because of outdated regulations”. PoliceAI interim director Al Murray was more careful: “This is not about replacing people with technology,” he said, adding that the disclosure process “is an essential safeguard in our justice system” and that officers must retain “the professional judgement that technology can never replace.”

That caution is well timed. On the same day this reform was announced, the High Court accepted an apology from the CPS for AI-hallucinated citations in extradition filings — the government legislating AI into the disclosure process while a prosecutor apologises for AI-fabricated authorities. It also lands a day after a Nuffield Foundation report found 45 AI tools already in UK justice with only seven independently evaluated.

Looking forward

The Home Office has accepted recommendations to move towards centralised procurement of police technology and to establish a national governance forum for disclosure technology, bringing together policing, the judiciary, prosecutors and government. Whether that oversight arrives before the tools do is the question the evidence base cannot yet answer.