One hundred and three pages announcing the newest police reforms were released by Shabana Mahmood earlier this week in what she supposes are the strongest and most significant changes to the system in roughly 200 years - we can be the judge of that.

First and foremost, Mahmood argues that the structure of the police forces that has existed for 60 years is inefficient and outdated for the current climate. She has proposed to whittle the number of forces down from 43 to as few as 12. These reforms are unlikely to be completed until as late as the mid 2030’s, allowing plenty of room for reconsideration. Once the extraneous forces are eliminated, chatbots will be deployed to respond to non-urgent queries – great news for fans of iRobot.

A brand new service will be created, somewhat of a ‘British FBI’, which will be named the National Police Service (NPS) made up by the already existing National Crime Agency, Counter Terrorism Policing, the National Police Air Service and National Roads Policing to tackle serious and more complex crimes. Times have changed, argues Mahmood; new and more advanced teams must advance and change with the times too, as knife crime amongst young people is at an all-time high. Alongside this, regional crime hubs will be created to target drugs, firearms, fraud and child sex abuse.

Mahmood has also promised to reform response times, holding officers to higher standards and to respond to serious incidents, like danger to life or violence on any scale, within 15 minutes in cities, and 20 minutes in rural areas.

The new Police Forces will also be graded and will have these grades published, allowing forces from surrounding areas to be compared and contrasted, adding a level of competition that Mahmood believes will boost morale, rather than create a toxic work environment.

Police.ai, an AI revolution, will be introduced as well with hopes to save officers from losing time in tasks such as redacting files before court cases and analysing footage from CCTV. Mahmood has estimated that this will save six million policing hours per year.

Handing over this amount of work to our new robot overlords has not yet been trialled or tested. It will be interesting, and scary, to see how this technology will handle its new responsibilities. Not only will it deciding how to organise and progress non-urgent queries but also deciding how 999 calls and 111 calls are escalated. No pressure then!