OKLAHOMA CITY, OK - A police sergeant with the Oklahoma City Police Department (OCPD) discusses using artificial intelligence (AI) to write his incident report after he and his K-9 searched for a group of suspects.
According to the Associated Press (AP), prior to this incident, Sgt. Matt Gilmore would have normally grabbed his laptop and spent roughly 30 to 45 minutes writing up a report about the hour-long search. However, this time, he decided to use an AI chatbot to write the first draft of the report. Pulling from the sounds and radio chatter picked up by the microphone attached to his body camera, the AI tool spit out a report in just eight seconds.
Gilmore said, "It was a better report than I could have ever written and it was 100 percent accurate. It flowed better." The report even documented a fact he didn't remember hearing, which was another officer's mention of the color of the car the suspects ran from. OCPD is one of the few departments that are experimenting with AI chatbots to produce the first drafts of incident reports.
According to the AP, police who have tried it out are enthused about the time-saving technology. However, some prosecutors, police watchdog groups, and legal scholars expressed their concerns about how the report written by AI could "alter a fundamental document" in the criminal justice system that plays a role in who ends up being prosecuted and sentenced.
Gilmore describes the technology as another "game changer" for police work. Axon, the company best known for developing the Taser and the dominant U.S. supplier of body cameras, developed the new AI product, which has been dubbed "Draft One." According to Axon's founder and CEO Rick Smith, the AI chatbot has had the "most positive reaction" of any product the company has introduced.
He said, "They became 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." Smith recognized that there are certainly concerns over the product, like district attorneys prosecuting a criminal case want to be sure that the police officers, not solely an AI chatbot, are responsible for authoring their reports because they may have to testify in court about what they witnessed.
Smith said, "They never want to get an officer on the stand who says, well, 'The AI wrote that, I didn't.'" AI is not new to the field of policing. Over the years police departments have adopted algorithmic tools to read license plates, recognize suspects' faces, detect gunshot sounds, and predict where crimes might occur. Many of those have come with privacy and civil rights concerns and attempts by some legislators to set safeguards.
However, using AI to write incident reports is so new that there are few, if any, guardrails guiding their use. 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, the department is only using the AI tool for minor incident reports that do not lead to someone getting arrested.
OCPD Captain Jason Bussert, who handles information technology for the 1,170-officer department said, "So no arrests, no felonies, no violent crimes." This is not the case with all departments piloting the AI tool. In Lafayette, Indiana, Police Chief Scott Galloway told the AP that all of his officers use Draft One on any kind of case and it has been "incredibly popular" since they started using it earlier in the year.
The technology of Draft One relies on the same generative AI model that powers ChatGPT, made by the San Francisco-based OpenAI. OpenAI is a close business partner with Microsoft, which is Axon's cloud computing provider. Noah Spitzer-Williams, who manages Axon's AI products said, "We use the same underlying technology as ChatGPT, but we have access to more knobs and dials than an actual ChatGPT would have."
He said that turning own the "creativity dial" helps the model stick to facts so that it "doesn't embellish or hallucinate in the same ways that you would find if you were just using ChatGPT on its own."
Axon is not the only vender for this type of product. Startups including Policereports.ai and Truleo are pitching similar products. But, given Axon's 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.
According to the Associated Press (AP), prior to this incident, Sgt. Matt Gilmore would have normally grabbed his laptop and spent roughly 30 to 45 minutes writing up a report about the hour-long search. However, this time, he decided to use an AI chatbot to write the first draft of the report. Pulling from the sounds and radio chatter picked up by the microphone attached to his body camera, the AI tool spit out a report in just eight seconds.
Gilmore said, "It was a better report than I could have ever written and it was 100 percent accurate. It flowed better." The report even documented a fact he didn't remember hearing, which was another officer's mention of the color of the car the suspects ran from. OCPD is one of the few departments that are experimenting with AI chatbots to produce the first drafts of incident reports.
According to the AP, police who have tried it out are enthused about the time-saving technology. However, some prosecutors, police watchdog groups, and legal scholars expressed their concerns about how the report written by AI could "alter a fundamental document" in the criminal justice system that plays a role in who ends up being prosecuted and sentenced.
Gilmore describes the technology as another "game changer" for police work. Axon, the company best known for developing the Taser and the dominant U.S. supplier of body cameras, developed the new AI product, which has been dubbed "Draft One." According to Axon's founder and CEO Rick Smith, the AI chatbot has had the "most positive reaction" of any product the company has introduced.
He said, "They became 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." Smith recognized that there are certainly concerns over the product, like district attorneys prosecuting a criminal case want to be sure that the police officers, not solely an AI chatbot, are responsible for authoring their reports because they may have to testify in court about what they witnessed.
Smith said, "They never want to get an officer on the stand who says, well, 'The AI wrote that, I didn't.'" AI is not new to the field of policing. Over the years police departments have adopted algorithmic tools to read license plates, recognize suspects' faces, detect gunshot sounds, and predict where crimes might occur. Many of those have come with privacy and civil rights concerns and attempts by some legislators to set safeguards.
However, using AI to write incident reports is so new that there are few, if any, guardrails guiding their use. 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, the department is only using the AI tool for minor incident reports that do not lead to someone getting arrested.
OCPD Captain Jason Bussert, who handles information technology for the 1,170-officer department said, "So no arrests, no felonies, no violent crimes." This is not the case with all departments piloting the AI tool. In Lafayette, Indiana, Police Chief Scott Galloway told the AP that all of his officers use Draft One on any kind of case and it has been "incredibly popular" since they started using it earlier in the year.
The technology of Draft One relies on the same generative AI model that powers ChatGPT, made by the San Francisco-based OpenAI. OpenAI is a close business partner with Microsoft, which is Axon's cloud computing provider. Noah Spitzer-Williams, who manages Axon's AI products said, "We use the same underlying technology as ChatGPT, but we have access to more knobs and dials than an actual ChatGPT would have."
He said that turning own the "creativity dial" helps the model stick to facts so that it "doesn't embellish or hallucinate in the same ways that you would find if you were just using ChatGPT on its own."
Axon is not the only vender for this type of product. Startups including Policereports.ai and Truleo are pitching similar products. But, given Axon's 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.
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