TL;DR
Alex Murray OBE has been confirmed as director of PoliceAI, the national centre for artificial intelligence in policing, following a competitive recruitment that the College of Policing ran, UKAuthority reported on Wednesday 7 October. The appointment gives a confirmed head to a centre with £75m of Home Office money spread over three years.
From portfolio to national centre
In 2024 Murray was appointed as the first AI lead for the National Police Chiefs’ Council. Since then he has turned that portfolio into PoliceAI, which January’s Policing White Paper set up to support responsible use of AI by forces in England and Wales. The College of Policing hosts it.
The centre’s job is to help forces find, trial and assure AI tools that improve operations, support victims, cut bureaucracy and make the public safer, then roll them out widely. Work under way includes AI to prepare evidence files and check their quality, to spot child sexual abuse imagery, and to speed up the review of CCTV and other digital footage. A public register showing how forces use AI is being developed.
Murray called the role “an incredible privilege”. He said the aim was to scale AI that brings “real benefits for victims and the public” while keeping it responsibly governed, and set out how he expects to be judged: “Success will be measured not by how much AI policing uses, but by the difference it makes to the people we serve.”
A career built on evidence
Murray’s career began on the front line and in CID with West Midlands Police. He went on to serve the Met as a specialist crime Commander, and later led West Mercia Police as its temporary Chief Constable. He also held the National Crime Agency’s portfolio on serious organised crime threats. He set up the Society of Evidence Based Policing. His OBE, awarded in 2017, recognised his services to policing.
Looking forward
In our view, the public register will be the clearest test of Murray’s stated measure. It is the place where forces’ use of AI becomes visible to the people it is meant to serve, and the obvious place to show what difference the tools have made. Our earlier reporting covers Murray’s account of the centre’s delivery mandate and the centre’s launch.