Who is West Midlands Police chief constable Craig Guildford?

The chief constable of West Midlands Police is in the spotlight after being forced to admit that fake information sourced through Artificial Intelligence played a part in advice that led to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being banned from attending a match against Aston Villa.

Away fans of the Israeli club were barred from the Europa League game in November following a decision from Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG).

Chief Constable Craig Guildford told the Home Affairs Select Committee as recently as 6 January that information about a match between Maccabi and West Ham, referenced in the force’s advice to the SAG, was sourced through social media and a Google search.

However, there was no such match and Guildford has now admitted in a letter to the committee that the information surfaced through use of Microsoft’s Copilot Artificial Intelligence (AI).

So, who is Guildford and what has his record been like?

He joined the second largest force in England from Nottinghamshire Police in December 2022, with a pledge to “bear down on criminals”.

With a policing career spanning three decades, he started with Cheshire Police in 1994 as a police constable. Within 18 months he joined the criminal investigation department.

He then continued to rise through the ranks at a number of forces across the UK, including being appointed as assistant chief constable with West Yorkshire Police in 2012, then deputy chief constable for Gwent Police two years later.

He was awarded The Queen’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service in 2021.

In 2023, the force area was also reported to have the highest rate of knife crime offences in England and Wales, topping London.

National figures showed there were 180 offences involving a blade per 100,000 population in the West Midlands conurbation, compared with 165 in the capital.

At the time, a number of high profile cases had rocked the region, including the murder of footballer Cody Fisher on a Birmingham nightclub dancefloor.

However, by October 2025 there was a 6% fall in all crime across the West Midlands, with vehicle crime, burglaries, robberies, serious youth violence and gun crime all seeing reductions, as Guildford told the BBC his force was cracking down on knife crime.

Both Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch and fellow Tory MP Nick Timothy, an Aston Villa fan, have called for Guildford to lose his job over the force’s safety advice concerning the Maccabi match.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews has also said he should be sacked, claiming that the force seemed to have made a decision to ban fans first and then “searched for evidence to justify it”.

Badenoch suggested West Midlands Police had “capitulated to Islamists”.

Guildford, however, said the decision to ban away fans was not taken lightly and was taken on safety, not political, grounds.

The Birmingham SAG is made up of the city council, fire and ambulance services, as well as West Midlands Police, but it is the force’s safety advice that has come under the greatest scrutiny.

Despite denying use of AI in the preparation of its safety recommendation at a Home Affairs Select Committee hearing on 6 December, Guildford was forced into a U-turn days later.

He said he did not mean to mislead MPs, but that unknown to him at the time he gave evidence, Microsoft’s Copilot had been used to source the “erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match”.

The BBC has approached Microsoft.

And the force has also been criticised for how it handled intelligence regarding a match between Ajax and Maccabi in Amsterdam.

A letter from Dutch police, seen by the BBC, appears to question evidence West Midlands Police cited about Maccabi fans’ behaviour before that game.

The government’s independent adviser on antisemitism, Lord Mann, told the Home Affairs Committee some of the evidence “conflated” different things, giving one example of running street battles that did not occur on a match day.

In a bid to protect his pension, Guildford actually retired as West Midlands Police’s chief constable in November 2024, but applied to take up the role again the next month – a move that was defended by the West Midlands police and crime commissioner Simon Foster.

Guildford had taken part in the countrywide scheme to help long-serving officers to stop their pension starting to fall in value after they had accrued 30 years’ service.

At the time, Foster said using it to keep Guildford was in the West Midlands’ best interest.