TL;DR

Emsou, the East Midlands regional unit that targets organised crime, has decided against a new Palantir contract after a two-year trial, the BBC reported on Monday 12 October, and is requiring the company to prove it has cut its links to the force’s systems and deleted its data. The decision lands days after the Metropolitan Police dismissed the head of its volunteer officers following misconduct uncovered with Palantir’s Foundry platform.

Why Emsou walked away

Emsou investigates murder, terrorism and drug trafficking across Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire. Its pilot began in October 2024 and fed Leicestershire Police data into Foundry, which uses AI and machine learning, though the unit will not say how the software was used, which datasets were involved or what it cost.

Ian Green, the unit’s regional assistant chief constable, tied the decision to money as much as results: the unit chose not to renew once its Home Office funding ran out, after weighing “what it would deliver, including our future funding streams”. Amnesty International UK, which is campaigning against Palantir’s NHS England contract, welcomed the move, calling the company “a growing liability for any public body that values human rights and public confidence”.

Palantir points to wider UK use, listing 11 police forces among its UK clients alongside the NHS and the MoD, and says that in one year it helped Bedfordshire identify 1,000 women whose partners had a domestic violence history, supporting Clare’s Law.

The Met’s case for Foundry

The Met, by contrast, credits Foundry with a result. On Friday 9 October, after a misconduct hearing, it sacked James Deller, the special chief officer in charge of its Special Constabulary. Using Foundry alongside lawful business monitoring, investigators established that during July and August 2025 Deller took photos on his police-issued phone of two intimate images first received on his personal phone via WhatsApp’s “view once” feature. The discovery came from Project Galatasaray, a week-long operation hunting corruption inside the force, and the College of Policing will add him to its barred list, keeping him out of policing for good.

That deployment has its own critics. In April the Met’s rank-and-file staff association, the Metropolitan Police Federation, urged officers to be wary of carrying Met devices off duty, and its general secretary Matt Cane complained that nobody had warned staff the upgrade introduced Palantir’s AI.

Looking forward

In our view, the two cases show UK policing judging Palantir force by force, and Emsou’s data-deletion demand is the detail other forces should note: ending a trial cleanly means proving the vendor no longer holds the data, not just stopping payment. With Palantir also suing London’s mayoral policing office over a blocked Met contract, procurement scrutiny of the company is unlikely to ease soon.