How AI will change what happens when you call 999

The government will spend £16.5 million on AI to change how police forces in England and Wales handle calls from the public.

The investment forms part of a wider £140 million AI package announced alongside the launch of PoliceAI, a new national centre that will develop, pilot and scale AI tools across all 43 forces.

The Home Office said the control room funding will pay for AI that transcribes 999 and 101 calls in real time, freeing call handlers to focus on the person on the line rather than typing notes.

The technology will also automatically link new crime reports to existing police data, spotting patterns across incidents and getting intelligence to officers faster.

A third strand will triage non-emergency calls. Policing minister Sarah Jones said around 60% of non-emergency calls relate to matters for organisations other than the police, and the AI system will route these to the right agency as quickly as possible.

“That will bring force control rooms into the 21st century, enabling a faster, more informed response,” Jones said in a speech marking the PoliceAI launch on 10 June.

The wider PoliceAI rollout

PoliceAI, hosted by the College of Policing, has a guaranteed £75 million budget over three years and will sit within the planned National Policing Service.

In its first year, the centre will run pilots in up to 10 forces using AI to triage, summarise and disclose digital evidence, one of the most time-consuming parts of any investigation. The government plans to scale the tools to all forces in 2027.

Early trials have produced striking results. In one kidnapping case, AI reviewed 800 hours of footage in three hours, leading to an early guilty plea. In another, instant translation of half a million e-books’ worth of Romanian-language data led to the arrest of an organised crime gang.

The Home Office said the technology will free up at least 6 million hours of police time by the end of 2028, the equivalent of 3,000 full-time officers.

The package also funds 40 more live facial recognition units, tripling current capacity, and a new Policing AI Threat Hub to tackle AI-enabled crime such as deepfake intimate images.

Jones acknowledged that AI carries risks, telling the audience that models “will always hallucinate” and pointing to an incident in the West Midlands where a hallucinated, non-existent football match found its way into a force’s decision-making process.

PoliceAI will publish a public registry of every AI tool in use across policing, developed with CENTRIC at Sheffield Hallam University, with a first version due in the autumn. All AI models will undergo independent testing for accuracy and bias.

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