Artificial intelligence is everywhere from social media feeds to political campaign ads. Now, police departments are testing AI tools that can turn body camera footage into draft police reports in a matter of minutes.
In Hays County, the sheriff’s department spent three months testing out a whole suite of AI-enabled software from police tech conglomerate Axon.
Axon, formerly TASER International, has contracts with a lot of departments across the Austin area. They still sell tasers, but now they also sell vehicle and body cameras and software that can do things like help departments manage evidence.
In a promotional video, the company’s CEO, Rick Smith, said Draft One is designed to automate one of the more time-consuming parts of police work.
“Draft One is an AI tool that takes the audio from a body camera,” Smith said. “We turn that into a transcript, and then from that transcript, we reformat that information into the form of a police report narrative.”
Eight deputies demoed Draft One for the Hays County Sheriff’s department.
To use the software, all deputies have to do is plug in their body camera. Then the system uploads and transcribes the video of the incident and prompts the officer to answer a few questions. They’re asked to do things like identify the type and severity of the incident and whether an arrest was made.
The process of answering those initial questions only takes a few minutes and then the software, which is powered by the same engine as ChatGPT, generates an incident-specific police report.
But the report isn’t ready to be filed immediately.
Officers have to read through the draft, fill in missing information and remove anything that doesn’t belong.
Sometimes the software makes errors. In Utah, the software generated a report that said the responding officer turned into a frog. That’s because the movie The Princess and the Frog was on in the background when the officer was responding to the call.
Drafts can include details unrelated to the body camera footage too, which Axon calls hallucinations. To have these kinds of errors end up in a case that goes to trial could be potentially catastrophic, so Axon has put safeguards in place.
Including having the software lie on purpose.
“You’ll get a sentence in there after the details of the incident that says, ‘The victim gained superpowers and was then, you know, trying to find a suspicious wizard,’ or something like that,” said Jonathan Garcia, one of the Hays County deputies who demoed the software.
The goal of these intentional insertions is to make sure that officers are reading and editing the AI draft carefully — which means that, hopefully, they catch all the accidental insertions too.
“It created the ability to write reports quicker and get back on the street,” Deputy Lindsey Henry said.
For straightforward calls, Henry said the software saved her 20 to 30 minutes per report.
But the new software has some folks in the justice system nervous.
Concerns from prosecutors
Gregg Cox, Hays County’s first assistant district attorney, said police reports are important to prosecutors as they decide how to handle a case.
“The offense report serves a lot of purposes,” Cox said. “It allows the prosecutor to read it and understand what happened and make charging decisions…and decisions about what a plea offer should look like, and if the case is gonna go to trial.”
Cox worries that relying on AI to create the first draft could affect how well officers retain the details of an incident.
“I would much rather have them write a detailed report themselves based on what they observed,” he said.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, raised similar concerns.
A body camera, he said, doesn’t capture everything an officer experiences during an encounter.
“Humans will, in an incident, see and remember things that a body camera does not catch,” Stanley said.
An officer might notice the smell of alcohol on someone’s breath, where a person’s eyes are focused or subtle changes in their behavior — details that may never be captured by a camera or microphone.
“The body camera will catch things that the human does not see or hear or notice,” Stanley said. “Those are two separate sets of evidence, and you need to preserve both of them to ensure fairness to defendants.”
Police reports can also be part of the disciplinary system for officers. If an officer’s conduct comes under question a report can give guidance into why they did what they did and when.
“Police reports serve as a constant reminder that officers do need to justify their use of the very powerful potential authorities that the public gives them,” Stanley said.
Community pushback
The Hays County Sheriff’s Office tested Draft One for 3 months during a trial period, but to keep using it, the county would have to pay for it.
The expanded contract with Axon would’ve cost Hays County $4.5 million over ten years.
But Draft One was unpopular with some members of the public and the county commissioners court.
Chief Deputy Bailey, who oversaw the three-month trial, said they wouldn’t be asking to fund Draft One, but still wanted to give officers the opportunity to use other Axon AI tools like live translation and unlimited video transcription.
But in a 3-2 vote, commissioners denied funding for those tools.
Draft One is just one of the AI tools being sold to police departments, and other departments in the Austin area have already implemented some.
The Kyle Police Department uses a number of Axon’s AI tools, but at the request of the District Attorney’s office, it doesn’t use Draft One in writing their reports.