I'm not sure I'd go that far, but they should at least be aware of the credibility of information sources they're using to making professional decisions upon. Your world gets very small if you can only gather information that you see with your own eyes, but they do need to validate things they "learn" from Google/FB/Reddit/Youtube/non-official sources. I was unimpressed by the chief's letter:
> In preparation for the force response to the HMICFRS inquiry into this matter, on Friday afternoon I became aware that the erroneous result concerning the West Ham v Maccabi Tel Aviv match arose as result of a use of Microsoft Co Pilot[sic]. Both ACC O’Hara and I had, up until Friday afternoon, understood that the West Ham match had only been identified through the use of Google.
My 3rd grader knows better than to do research based solely on a Google summary snippet, and even understands that just because a linked article under the search agrees with the search that this doesn't mean it's true.
I would have expected that if the chief's staff were investigating rumors of a riot in a stadium 3 hours away, they'd call their counterparts at the police station in that location to get police reports from the incident.
They have trivial access to those official reports. They shouldn't be reliant on journalists sensationalizing, and opining the events for their news articles. They shouldn't be reliant on a search engine that exists to sell ads for those news organizations. They certainly shouldn't trust "Co Pilot" to figure out what may or may not have happened! It seems obvious to me that the tool could happily generate a police report from whole cloth.
