A first interim report is available. Sir Andy Cooke, who has to examine the work of the British police services, published an initial report on the Euroleague game between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv presented on November 6th last year.
Early criticism of West Midlands Police, Britain’s second-largest police force, for completely misjudging the security risks of the game is largely confirmed in Cooke’s report.
His report was commissioned by British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. Now Mahmood said she has no trust in the department’s police chief. It is interesting that this assessment is shared across all parties and almost unanimously in the lower house of parliament.
The police only interpreted facts to fit their own prejudices, they say
Cooke speaks in his report of a “confirmation bias“, a confirmation bias known from psychology, according to which one only perceives facts in a way that fits one’s own prejudices. According to Cooke, the police overestimated certain facts and misrepresented them in order to reach the decision not to let Maccabi fans come to the game. Cooke also complains that the police did not seek contact with the local Jewish community.
One-sided reading of the Amsterdam incidents
Nevertheless, Cooke does not see any anti-Semitic motivation in the police’s actions. Rather, certain facts are just facts about a game that took place a year earlier, in November 2024, in the Netherlands Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv had taken place, misrepresented. At that time there were serious attacks against fans of the Israeli club.
One of the mistakes made by the West Midlands Police is that the number of police officers deployed at the time was 5,000, more than three times as high as confirmed by the Dutch police. Or the claim that a pro-Palestinian demonstrator was thrown into a canal at that time. The entire narrative that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans are to blame for the Amsterdam incidents does not hold water. Instead, Cooke said, Maccabi fans were targeted attacked become.
A few hours before Cooke’s report was published, Craig Guildfort, chief constable of West Midlands Police, admitted that his agency had relied on artificial intelligence in its threat assessment ahead of the Aston Villa game Microsoft Co-Pilot served – with remarkable results. This is how the report of a game between Maccabi Tel Aviv and West Ham United that would have taken place in England in 2023 was spit out. However, the game didn’t exist. Microsoft has since stated that tests cannot replicate the result stated by the authority.
Although Maccabi Tel Aviv had hosted a number of international games after Amsterdam – all without major incidents – the authority had made no effort to communicate with police forces in those countries, Cooke continued.
Anti-Semitism was completely ignored
And there is something else that West Midlands Police have completely ignored. That four weeks before Maccabi’s game at Aston Villa was the hardest so far anti-Semitic terrorist attack in British history: On the highest Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, a synagogue in Manchester was attacked. Not least because of this, the Israeli club’s Euro League game was of national and international importance.
Only one MP objected to Andy Cooke’s report in the House of Commons. Ayoub Khan, who belongs to the left-wing group founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah SultanaYour Party Heard spoke of a “witch hunt” against the police chief and of “shameless racism and violence from Maccabi fans”.
The Interior Minister cannot fire the police chief herself. Currently only the Police Commissioner for the Greater Birmingham Region can do this. He said he was taking his time to examine everything and might want to wait for Cooke’s final report and a parliamentary inquiry report.
Maybe that’s politics too. The British government decided in November to abolish such checkpoints because they were expensive and of little use. Because of the incident with the West Midlands Police, Interior Minister Mahmood now wants to take back the authority to fire a police leadership.