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A body camera captured every word and bark uttered as police Sgt. Matt Gilmore and his K-9 dog, Gunner, searched for a group of suspects for nearly an hour.<\/p>\n
Normally, the Oklahoma City police sergeant would grab his laptop and spend another 30 to 45 minutes writing up a report about the search. But this time he had\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/a>\u00a0write the first draft.<\/p>\n Pulling from all the sounds and radio chatter picked up by the microphone attached to Gilbert\u2019s body camera, the AI tool churned out a report in eight seconds.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate. It flowed better,\u201d Gilbert said. It even documented a fact he didn\u2019t remember hearing \u2014 another officer\u2019s mention of the color of the car the suspects ran from.<\/p>\n Oklahoma City\u2019s police department is one of a handful to experiment with AI chatbots to produce the first drafts of incident reports. Police officers who\u2019ve tried it are enthused about the time-saving technology, while some prosecutors, police watchdogs and legal scholars have concerns about how it could alter a fundamental document in the criminal justice system that plays a role in who gets prosecuted or imprisoned.<\/p>\n Built with the same technology as ChatGPT and sold by Axon, best known for developing the Taser and as the dominant U.S. supplier of body cameras, it could become what Gilbert describes as another \u201cgame changer\u201d for police work.<\/p>\n \u201cThey become police officers because they want to do police work, and spending half their day doing data entry is just a tedious part of the job that they hate,\u201d said Axon\u2019s founder and CEO Rick Smith, describing the new AI product \u2014 called Draft One \u2014 as having the \u201cmost positive reaction\u201d of any product the company has introduced.<\/p>\n \u201cNow, there\u2019s certainly concerns,\u201d Smith added. In particular, he said district attorneys prosecuting a criminal case want to be sure that police officers \u2014 not solely an AI chatbot \u2014 are responsible for authoring their reports because they may have to testify in court about what they witnessed.<\/p>\n \u201cThey never want to get an officer on the stand who says, well, \u2018The AI wrote that, I didn\u2019t,\u2019\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n AI technology is not new to police agencies, which have adopted algorithmic tools to read license plates,\u00a0recognize suspects\u2019 faces<\/a>,\u00a0detect gunshot sounds<\/a>and predict where crimes might occur. Many of those applications have come with privacy and civil rights concerns\u00a0and attempts by legislators<\/a>\u00a0to set safeguards. But the introduction of AI-generated police reports is so new that there are few, if any, guardrails guiding their use.<\/p>\n Concerns about society\u2019s racial biases and prejudices\u00a0getting built into AI technology<\/a>\u00a0are just part of what Oklahoma City community activist aurelius francisco finds \u201cdeeply troubling\u201d about the new tool, which he learned about from The Associated Press.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that the technology is being used by the same company that provides Tasers to the department is alarming enough,\u201d said francisco, a co-founder of the Foundation for Liberating Minds in Oklahoma City.<\/p>\n He said automating those reports will \u201cease the police\u2019s ability to harass, surveil and inflict violence on community members. While making the cop\u2019s job easier, it makes Black and brown people\u2019s lives harder.\u201d<\/p>\n Before trying out the tool in Oklahoma City, police officials showed it to local prosecutors who advised some caution before using it on high-stakes criminal cases. For now, it\u2019s only used for minor incident reports that don\u2019t lead to someone getting arrested.<\/p>\n \u201cSo no arrests, no felonies, no violent crimes,\u201d said Oklahoma City police Capt. Jason Bussert, who handles information technology for the 1,170-officer department.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not the case in another city, Lafayette, Indiana, where Police Chief Scott Galloway told the AP that all of his officers can use Draft One on any kind of case and it\u2019s been \u201cincredibly popular\u201d since the pilot began earlier this year.<\/p>\n Or in Fort Collins, Colorado, where police Sgt. Robert Younger said officers are free to use it on any type of report, though they discovered it doesn\u2019t work well on patrols of the city\u2019s downtown bar district because of an \u201coverwhelming amount of noise.\u201d<\/p>\n Along with using AI to analyze and summarize the audio recording, Axon experimented with computer vision to summarize what\u2019s \u201cseen\u201d in the video footage, before quickly realizing that the technology was not ready.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven all the sensitivities around policing, around race and other identities of people involved, that\u2019s an area where I think we\u2019re going to have to do some real work before we would introduce it,\u201d said Smith, the Axon CEO, describing some of the tested responses as not \u201covertly racist\u201d but insensitive in other ways.<\/p>\n Those experiments led Axon to focus squarely on audio in the product unveiled in April during its annual company conference for police officials.<\/p>\n The technology relies on the same generative AI model that powers ChatGPT, made by San Francisco-based OpenAI. OpenAI is a close business partner with Microsoft<\/a>, which is Axon\u2019s cloud computing provider.<\/p>\n \u201cWe use the same underlying technology as ChatGPT, but we have access to more knobs and dials than an actual ChatGPT user would have,\u201d said Noah Spitzer-Williams, who manages Axon\u2019s AI products. Turning down the \u201ccreativity dial\u201d helps the model stick to facts so that it \u201cdoesn\u2019t embellish or hallucinate in the same ways that you would find if you were just using ChatGPT on its own,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Axon won\u2019t say how many police departments are using the technology. It\u2019s not the only vendor, with startups like Policereports.ai and Truleo pitching similar products. But given Axon\u2019s deep relationship with police departments that buy its Tasers and body cameras, experts and police officials expect AI-generated reports to become more ubiquitous in the coming months and years.<\/p>\n Before that happens, legal scholar Andrew Ferguson<\/a> would like to see more of a public discussion about the benefits and potential harms. For one thing, the large language models behind AI chatbots are prone to making up false information, a problem\u00a0known as hallucination<\/a>\u00a0that could add convincing and hard-to-notice falsehoods into a police report.<\/p>\n \u201cI am concerned that automation and the ease of the technology would cause police officers to be sort of less careful with their writing,\u201d said Ferguson, a law professor at American University working on what\u2019s expected to be the first law review article on the emerging technology.<\/p>\n Ferguson said a police report is important in determining whether an officer\u2019s suspicion \u201cjustifies someone\u2019s loss of liberty.\u201d It\u2019s sometimes the only testimony a judge sees, especially for misdemeanor crimes.<\/p>\n Human-generated police reports also have flaws, Ferguson said, but it\u2019s an open question as to which is more reliable.<\/p>\n For some officers who\u2019ve tried it, it is already changing how they respond to a reported crime. They\u2019re narrating what\u2019s happening so the camera better captures what they\u2019d want to put in writing.<\/p>\n As the technology catches on, Bussert expects officers will become \u201cmore and more verbal\u201d in describing what\u2019s in front of them.<\/p>\n After Bussert loaded the video of a traffic stop into the system and pressed a button, the program produced a narrative-style report in conversational language that included dates and times, just like an officer would have typed from his notes, all based on audio from the body camera.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was literally seconds,\u201d Gilmore said, \u201cand it was done to the point where I was like, \u2018I don\u2019t have anything to change.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n At the end of the report, the officer must click a box that indicates it was generated with the use of AI.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n