Typically, a police officer will write a crime report following an incident. Are cops good at writing? Probably not. So what if AI could do it for them?
That’s what they’re trying out in Oklahoma City. After a body camera captured Sgt. Matt Gilmore and his K-9 dog’s search for suspects, the sergeant ordered AI to write the first draft of his report instead of transcribing the footage himself—a task that would typically take up to 45 minutes.
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“It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate. It flowed better,” he told the Associated Press. Gilbert said the report even included details that he had admittedly forgotten.
Oklahoma City is just one of many police departments around the country testing AI in drafting reports. They say it has proven to be an accurate alternative to hands-on transcribing and that it has saved time.
“[Police officers] 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,” said Rick Smith, founder and CEO of Axon, a company that sells tasers, body cameras, and now tools for “digital evidence management.” They do big business: Pittsburgh recently signed a 10-year, $39-million contract with the company.
Draft One, Axon’s flagship AI product, automatically transcribes audio recorded by the company’s body cams. When an officer requests a report, the software analyzes the transcript based on a few prompts and then writes a draft for them, which they then verify, revise, and submit.
This isn’t without its risks and complexities.
“The fact that the technology is being used by the same company that provides Tasers to the department is alarming enough,” said Aurelius Francisco, a co-founder of the Foundation for Liberating Minds in Oklahoma City. “While making the cop’s job easier, it makes Black and brown people’s lives harder.”
We know that AI sometimes makes stuff up. Does it do that worse than cops already do? Certainly, being a bad writer doesn’t mean that you’d somehow be a good editor.
