Fort Collins, Colorado
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In his 9 years on the Fort Collins, Colorado, police division, Officer Scott Brittingham says he has taken quite a lot of satisfaction within the strategy of writing reports after every name for service.
But when the division determined to take a look at a software to pace issues up, he was intrigued. Now, a report which may have beforehand taken him 45 minutes to write takes simply 10 minutes.
“I was a little bit skeptical, I’m not a big technology person,” Brittingham mentioned in a March interview on the Fort Collins police station for NCS’s Terms of Service podcast. But spending much less time writing reports means Brittingham can “take more calls for service” and “be proactive in preventing crime,” he mentioned.
Brittingham is referring to Draft One, synthetic intelligence-powered software program that creates the primary draft of police reports, aiming to make the method quicker and simpler. And his expertise could more and more grow to be the norm for police officers as departments throughout the nation undertake the software. It’s gaining traction whilst some authorized consultants and civil rights advocates elevate considerations that AI-drafted police reports might comprise biases or inaccuracies, in addition to presenting potential transparency points.
Axon — the legislation enforcement tech firm behind the software that additionally makes tasers and physique cameras — mentioned Draft One has been its quickest rising product because it launched final yr. And Axon isn’t the one participant on this trade; legislation enforcement tech firm Truleo makes an analogous AI police report software referred to as Field Notes.
Police reports sit on the coronary heart of the prison justice course of — officers use them to element an incident and clarify why they took the actions they did, and should later use them to put together if they’ve to testify in courtroom. Reports can even inform prosecutors, protection attorneys, judges and the general public concerning the officer’s perspective on what happened. They can affect whether or not a prosecutor decides to take a case, or whether or not a decide decides to maintain somebody with out bond, mentioned Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, an American University legislation professor who research the intersection of expertise and policing.
“Police reports are really an accountability mechanism,” Ferguson mentioned. “It’s a justification for state power, for police power.”
For that purpose, proponents of Draft One tout the potential for AI to make reports extra correct and complete, as well as to its time-saving advantages. But skeptics fear that any points with the expertise might have main ramifications for folks’s lives. At least one state has already handed a legislation regulating using AI-drafted police reports.
Draft One’s rollout additionally comes amid broader considerations round AI in legislation enforcement, after experiments elsewhere with facial recognition expertise have led to wrongful arrests.
“I do think it’s a growing movement. Like lots of AI, people are looking at how do we update? How do we improve?” Ferguson mentioned of AI police report expertise. “There’s a hype level, too, that people are pushing this because there’s money to be made on the technology.”
After an officer information an interplay on their physique digicam, they will request that Draft One create a report. The software makes use of the transcript from the physique digicam footage to create the draft, which begins to seem inside seconds of the request. The officer is then prompted to assessment the draft and fill in further particulars earlier than submitting it as remaining.
Each draft report comprises bracketed fill-in-the-blanks that an officer should both full or delete earlier than it may be submitted. The clean parts are designed to guarantee officers learn via the drafts to right potential errors or add lacking data.
“It really does have to be the officer’s own report at the end of the day, and they have to sign off as to what happened,” Axon President Josh Isner advised NCS.
Draft One makes use of a modified model of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Axon additional examined and educated to scale back the chance of “hallucinations,” factual errors that AI techniques can randomly generate. Axon additionally says it really works with a bunch of third-party lecturers, restorative justice advocates and neighborhood leaders that present suggestions on how to responsibly develop its expertise and mitigate potential biases.
The concept for Draft One got here from staffing shortages that Axon’s police division purchasers have been dealing with, Isner mentioned. In a 2024 survey of greater than 1,000 US police companies, the International Association of Chiefs of Police discovered that companies have been working at the least 10% under their licensed staffing ranges on common.
“The biggest problem in public safety right now is hiring. You cannot hire enough police officers,” Isner mentioned. “Anything a police department can adopt to make them more efficient is kind of the name of the game right now.”
Axon declined to say what number of departments at the moment use Draft One, however police have additionally adopted it in Lafayette, Indiana; Tampa, Florida; and Campbell, California. And on condition that “almost every single department” within the United States makes use of at the least one Axon product, in accordance to Isner, the expansion potential for the product seems excessive.
In Fort Collins, Technology Sergeant Bob Younger determined to take a look at Draft One final summer time after seeing a demo of the software.
“I was blown away at the quality of the report, the accuracy of the report and how fast it happened,” he mentioned. “I thought to myself, ‘This is an opportunity that we cannot let go.’”
The division initially made the expertise out there to round 70 officers; now all officers have entry. Younger estimates the software has diminished the time officers spend writing reports by practically 70%, “and that’s time we can give back to our citizens,” he mentioned.
Isner mentioned he’s acquired largely optimistic suggestions from prosecutors about Draft One.
But final September, the prosecutor’s workplace in King County, Washington, said it would not accept police reports drafted with the help of AI after native legislation enforcement companies expressed curiosity in utilizing Draft One. The workplace mentioned utilizing the software would “likely result in many of your officers approving Axon drafted narratives with unintentional errors in them,” in an electronic mail to police chiefs.
An Axon spokesperson mentioned that the corporate is “committed to continuous collaboration with police agencies, prosecutors, defense attorneys, community advocates, and other stakeholders to gather input and guide the responsible evolution of Draft One.” They added that the AI mannequin underlying Draft One is “calibrated … to minimize speculation or embellishments.”
But King County prosecutors aren’t the one ones involved about errors or biases in AI-drafted police reports.
“When you see this brand new technology being inserted in some ways into the heart of the criminal justice system, which is already rife with injustice and bias and so forth, it’s definitely something that we sit bolt upright and take a close look at,” mentioned Jay Stanley, a coverage analyst with the ACLU Speech Privacy and Technology Project, who printed a report final yr recommending in opposition to utilizing Draft One.
Even Ferguson, who believes the expertise will possible grow to be the norm in policing, mentioned he worries about errors in transcripts of physique digicam footage impacting reports.
“The transcript that you get, which becomes a police report, might be filled with misunderstandings, because the algorithm didn’t understand, like, a southern accent or a different kind of accent,” Ferguson mentioned. He additionally added that nonverbal cues — for instance, if an individual nodded slightly than saying “yes” out loud — won’t be mirrored.
Axon tries to stop errors or lacking particulars with these computerized clean fields. However, in a demo on the Fort Collins Police Department, NCS noticed that it is potential to delete all the prompts and submit a report with out making any modifications. And as soon as a report is submitted as remaining, the unique, AI-generated draft isn’t saved, so it’s not potential to see what an officer did or didn’t change.
Axon says that’s meant to mimic the old-school course of the place, even when an officer was writing by hand, their drafts wouldn’t be saved together with their remaining report. The firm additionally presents an opt-in setting that lets police departments require a sure proportion of the report be edited earlier than the draft is submitted.
And then there’s the query of transparency, and whether or not a defendant may know the police report of their case was drafted by AI.
Final reports created with Draft One embody a customizable disclaimer by default, noting that they have been written with the help of AI, however departments can flip that function off. The Fort Collins Police Department doesn’t embody disclaimers, however officers are incentivized to make reports their very own and guarantee their accuracy, Younger mentioned.
“What an officer is worried about is being critiqued or held responsible for an error or doing something and being inaccurate,” he mentioned. “Officers are super hyper-focused on the quality and quantity of their work.”
But Ferguson mentioned he believes “radical transparency is the best practice.” In Utah, state lawmakers handed a law earlier this yr that requires police departments to embody that disclaimer on remaining reports that have been drafted by AI.
Ultimately, like so many different purposes of AI, Draft One is a software that depends on accountable, well-meaning customers.
“My overall impression is that it’s a tool like anything else,” Brittingham mentioned. “It’s not the fix. It’s not replacing us writing reports. It’s just a tool to help us with writing reports.”