In January 2026, the Home Office published a document called ‘From Local to National: A New Model for Policing’. At its centre was a promise; a new national unit called Police.AI that would return six million hours a year to frontline officers, the equivalent of putting three thousand more police back on the street. Alongside that promise was a second, more visible one. Live Facial Recognition; fifty camera-equipped vans that would move into town centres and high-crime areas across the country.

In Croydon last year, a community worker, was wrongly flagged by an LFR-assisted alert, stopped and questioned by Metropolitan Police officers for nearly thirty minutes. His case has stayed at the centre of the public argument for a reason.

And that is the reason for our next book, Policing by Consent in the Age of AI.

The book analyses the 2026 Policing White Paper directly against the EU AI Act’s rights-based framework, not as an abstract comparison, but because the two approaches answer the same set of questions completely differently.