UK police forces dodge questions on Palantir

As AI systems drive a coach and horses through the UK’s culture of policing by consent, police forces up and down the UK have drawn a veil over links with the US spy-tech company Palantir.

Last year, Palantir signed a contract worth more than £800,000 with Leicestershire Police to supply an “intelligence and investigation platform”.

The deal was made with the East Midlands Special Operations Unit, a group of officers from Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Nottinghamshire which focuses on organised and violent crime and counter-terrorism.

Palantir has worked with US agencies accused of separating children from their parents, wrongfully detaining thousands of US citizens and forcibly sterilising women. The day after Israel was accused of genocide at the International Criminal Court, the company signed a deal with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to provide “support for war-related missions”. And Palantir’s predictive policing project in LA was cancelled in 2019 after accusations that it entrenched racism and didn’t reduce crime.

Good Law Project has been sending freedom of information requests to all 45 police forces in the UK to ask if they also had deals with this dangerous firm. Thirty-five of them refused to answer, citing national security and law enforcement exemptions.

For Good Law Project’s tech and data lead, Duncan McCann, the idea that there would be any danger if police forces revealed the software they’re using and how much they pay for it would be “laughable, if it wasn’t so sinister”.

“It’s ridiculous to suggest that telling the public what companies the police are working with and how much it costs could present any kind of risk to national security or law enforcement,” McCann said. “It’s clear that police forces want to import failed technology from the US without proper scrutiny.”

Some forces cited a “national stance” which rules out giving details of software packages “unless its use in policing has been nationally acknowledged”. But Bedfordshire Police told the Times that a Palantir system made it “the first county in Britain to be policed by AI”, and other forces were happy to provide Good Law Project some information.

Gwent Police made a straightforward declaration that “the procurement department knows of no contracts ever held with Palantir Technologies”. Police Scotland, South Wales Police, and South Yorkshire Police forces said they could not find any record of contracts with Palantir on their systems. Kent Police refused to say whether Palantir software was in use for covert operations, but confirmed that “as far as can be reasonably ascertained Kent Police have not purchased or trialled any software supplied by Palantir Technologies”.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed that the service “did not have a contract or relationship with Palantir” between November 2019 and July 2021, but did not say whether this is still the case, citing national security and law enforcement exemptions.

The absurd secrecy that surrounds police contracts with Palantir doesn’t stop there. Following Good Law Project’s requests for information, Leicestershire Police removed details of their Palantir contract from the public record.

When challenged, the East Midlands Special Operations Unit refused to explain, claiming only that “we have followed appropriate procurement processes, to secure services to support the delivery of operational policing”. None of the forces that work with Leicestershire Police in this unit would confirm or deny the existence of any contract with Palantir.

Northamptonshire Police even tried to draw a distinction between publishing details of contracts and responding to freedom of information requests.

“Although there may be some information in the public domain already,” it said, “the availability of this information may change over time and no longer be classed as being in the public domain, however Freedom of Information Act disclosures are to the world at large and will remain in the public domain, for all to see, indefinitely.”

When we asked Palantir for a comment, the company didn’t respond.

According to McCann, all this obfuscation is particularly worrying when the company concerned is as “dangerous” as Palantir.

“Governments like to present technology as a neutral solution to social problems,” McCann explained, “but research shows that Palantir’s software makes political choices even in the way it carves up the data. The rightwing politics embedded in Palantir’s systems have been shown to be both racist and ineffective. Police forces who want to play games with public trust by pursuing the failed model of predictive policing must come clean on spy-tech contracts so they can be held to account.”