Alex Murray has been confirmed as director of PoliceAI, the national centre tasked with helping police forces in England and Wales find, trial and oversee AI tools. The centre has £75m in Home Office funding over three years, and its developing public register will be one way to show what forces are using.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Resultsense reports, citing UKAuthority, that the College of Policing ran a competitive recruitment for the appointment. PoliceAI is hosted by the College and was set up following January’s Policing White Paper. Murray previously served as the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first AI lead.
Work under way includes tools to prepare evidence files and check their quality, identify child sexual abuse imagery, and speed up the review of CCTV and other digital footage. Resultsense says a public register of police use of AI is also being developed. Murray said the aim was to scale tools that benefit victims and the public while keeping them responsibly governed.
Why it matters
PoliceAI’s remit reaches beyond experimentation: it is meant to help forces assess tools and roll useful ones out more widely. That makes the centre’s choices, and the evidence behind them, consequential for policing and the people subject to it. The proposed register could help make deployments visible, but a list of tools alone would not show whether they work well or improve outcomes.
Our read
The appointment puts a named leader in charge of a substantial programme, but the real test is what the £75m produces and how the public can scrutinise it. A register is a promising start; it should tell people not just where AI is used, but what it is meant to do and how its impact is assessed.
What to watch
- When the public register will appear, and what information it will include.
- Which forces trial or adopt the evidence, imagery and footage tools.
- What measures PoliceAI uses to judge benefits, errors and oversight.
Discussion spark: Should police forces have to publish evidence of a tool’s accuracy and real-world impact before deploying AI, or is a public register and ongoing oversight enough?
Sources and evidence
- Alex Murray confirmed as director of the national PoliceAI centre – Resultsense (7 October 2026, 09:15 UTC)
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