A senior British police officer announced his early retirement on Friday amid a scandal around his force’s handling of a soccer match in November between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Birmingham’s Aston Villa F.C.
Craig Guildford, chief constable of the West Midlands Police, made the move after criticism, including within the police and in the political establishment, over his force’s decision to ban Maccabi fans from the Nov. 6 Europa League match in the United Kingdom’s second-largest city.
The scandal has undermined the confidence of many British Jews at a time when their community is facing elevated levels of risk amid an increase in antisemitic hatred and violence.
Critics have said that Guildford and his officers had mishandled intelligence, discriminated against Jews and Israelis and then repeatedly tried to cover this up by misleading officials at security meetings, as well as the public and elected politicians.
“I have come to the conclusion that the political and media frenzy around myself and my position has become detrimental to all the great work undertaken by my officers and staff in serving communities across the West Midlands. I have carefully considered my position and concluded that retirement is in the best interests of the organization, myself and my family,” Guildford wrote.
Under Guildford, West Midlands Police declined to say for three weeks whether Maccabi fans had been banned from the Nov. 6 event because of threats against them, or because the Maccabi fans were deemed a threat themselves.
After three weeks, the force said both answers were true, citing intelligence allegedly received from Amsterdam’s police force about Maccabi fans from November 2024, when Arab and Muslim men led what some of them called a “Jew hunt” in the Dutch metropolis for Maccabi fans.
West Midlands Police inverted some of the accounts from Amsterdam, including by falsely claiming that Israelis pushed others into canals. In fact, the perpetrators of the so-called “Amsterdam Jew-hunt” pushed at least one Israeli into the water, with no incident happening in the reverse, The Sunday Times revealed in December, based on interviews with Amsterdam police officials.
These and other failures
On Wednesday, a report from the body that polices the police, the police chief inspectorate, addressed these and other failures.
In the 11-page report, sent to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, the inspectorate said there was “confirmation bias” by the police to justify the ban. Officers overstated the threat posed by Maccabi fans and downplayed the threat to them, it said.
West Midlands Police did have “high confidence intelligence” that locals in Birmingham were planning to arm themselves to attack Maccabi supporters. That intelligence was received in the first week of September but only revealed publicly last week by lawmakers, Sky News reported.
A senior officer working under Guildford, Assistant Chief Constable Mike O’Hara, claimed last month that the Jewish community of Birmingham had supported the ban. He apologized for making this claim after the leaders of the community disputed and protested it.
Another element of the scandal concerned West Midlands Police’s claim that it had an intelligence report from a previous Maccabi match in England against West Ham United F.C., although that game never existed, and no report had been written about it.
Faced with allegations that officers relied on bogus AI information, the force insisted this information did not come from tapping into an AI tool but from a Google search. Yet this week, officers admitted the information came from an unverified reply from Microsoft’s Copilot AI system. Guildford apologized for this.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC on Friday: “We no longer have confidence in the chief constable.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which had called on Guildford to resign, said in a statement on Friday that “it was right” that he did so.
“Strong working relationships with the police are vital to the security of Jewish communities locally and nationally. We are ready to work with the local Jewish community, the Chief Constable’s successors, and the government, to restore confidence that this episode has so seriously eroded,” the board’s statement read.
