Met Police sacks the head of its volunteer Special Constabulary after a Palantir-assisted misconduct sweep found intimate images on his work phone
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 10 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra162 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5101 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash192 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7131 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 101 days before it.
Key facts
- Hearing: accelerated misconduct hearing on Friday Oct 9, 2026; the officer had been suspended in May 2026; he will be placed on the College of Policing barred list; no criminal charge (LBC)
- Conduct found: in July and August 2025 he used his work phone to photograph intimate images of a woman sent to his personal phone via WhatsApp ‘view once’, then moved them to his personal device and deleted them (LBC)
- Detection: Palantir Foundry plus lawful business monitoring (LBM) identified the images and other key evidence (LBC, Brit Brief)
- Met Commander Pete Stevens: special constables ‘deserve leadership demonstrating the highest standards’; the conduct ‘undermined public trust’ (LBC, paraphrased)
- Project Galatasaray (first reported April 2026, Guardian via Resultsense): a one-week run of Palantir software over data the Met already held led to 98 officers being assessed over abuse of the shift-rostering system and ~500 prevention notices, 42 senior officers (chief inspector to chief superintendent) assessed for falsely claiming office attendance, 12 gross-misconduct probes for undeclared Freemasonry and 3 arrests (fraud, sexual assault, misuse of police systems, abuse of authority for sexual purposes)
- Opposition: the Metropolitan Police Federation called the system an ‘outrageous and unforgivable invasion of privacy’ and considered legal action (Silicon UK); London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office blocked a proposed £50m Met–Palantir deal in July 2026, citing a breach of procurement rules (Silicon UK, ITV)
- The BBC and LBC name the dismissed officer; this entry does not
What happened
The BBC reported on Oct 10 that the Met’s most senior volunteer officer had been dismissed after its Palantir-backed integrity sweep. The BBC article itself could not be fetched (blocked for this crawler); details come from LBC and other outlets that carried the same Met statement.
Why it matters
It is a high-profile UK case of AI-assisted analytics being used to police a workforce from the inside, and a test of the Met’s contested use of Palantir, which unions call surveillance and London’s mayor tried to block.
Sources
6 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
6 sources: 6 press
Press
- LBC: Met’s most senior special constable sacked after AI tool found sexual content on work phonelbc.co.uk, press
- Brit Brief: Met Police volunteer chief sacked over intimate images after Palantir probebritbrief.co.uk, press
- Resultsense: Met Police uses Palantir AI to investigate hundreds of officers (Apr 27, 2026, summarizing the Guardian)resultsense.com, press
- Silicon UK: Met Police Federation decries ‘outrageous’ Palantir AI systemsilicon.co.uk, press
- Silicon UK: Met Police warns of cuts after mayor blocks £50m Palantir dealsilicon.co.uk, press
- ITV: London mayor’s office blocking Met deal was unlawful, court documents claim (July 9, 2026)itv.com, press
Changes
- Filed. Project Galatasaray background from April 2026 coverage, which the dataset had missed