generated a report that said the responding officer turned into a frog<\/a>. That\u2019s because the movie The Princess and the Frog was on in the background when the officer was responding to the call.<\/p>\nDrafts 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.<\/p>\n
Including having the software lie on purpose.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’ll get a sentence in there after the details of the incident that says, \u2018The victim gained superpowers and was then, you know, trying to find a suspicious wizard,\u2019 or something like that,\u201d said Jonathan Garcia, one of the Hays County deputies who demoed the software.<\/p>\n
The goal of these intentional insertions is to make sure that officers are reading and editing the AI draft carefully \u2014 which means that, hopefully, they catch all the accidental insertions too.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt created the ability to write reports quicker and get back on the street,\u201d Deputy Lindsey Henry said.<\/p>\n
For straightforward calls, Henry said the software saved her 20 to 30 minutes per report. <\/p>\n
But the new software has some folks in the justice system nervous.<\/p>\n
Concerns from prosecutors<\/p>\n
Gregg Cox, Hays County’s first assistant district attorney, said police reports are important to prosecutors as they decide how to handle a case.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe offense report serves a lot of purposes,\u201d Cox said. \u201cIt allows the prosecutor to read it and understand what happened and make charging decisions\u2026and decisions about what a plea offer should look like, and if the case is gonna go to trial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cox worries that relying on AI to create the first draft could affect how well officers retain the details of an incident.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would much rather have them write a detailed report themselves based on what they observed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, raised similar concerns.<\/p>\n
A body camera, he said, doesn’t capture everything an officer experiences during an encounter.<\/p>\n
\u201cHumans will, in an incident, see and remember things that a body camera does not catch,\u201d Stanley said.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 details that may never be captured by a camera or microphone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe body camera will catch things that the human does not see or hear or notice,\u201d Stanley said. \u201cThose are two separate sets of evidence, and you need to preserve both of them to ensure fairness to defendants.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cPolice 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,\u201d Stanley said.<\/p>\n
Community pushback <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The expanded contract with Axon would\u2019ve cost Hays County $4.5 million over ten years.<\/p>\n
But Draft One was unpopular with some members of the public and the county commissioners court.<\/p>\n
Chief Deputy Bailey, who oversaw the three-month trial, said they wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
But in a 3-2 vote, commissioners denied funding for those tools.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
The Kyle Police Department uses a number of Axon\u2019s AI tools, but at the request of the District Attorney\u2019s office, it doesn\u2019t use Draft One in writing their reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artificial intelligence is everywhere from social media feeds to political campaign ads. Now, police departments are testing AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":455846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[3436,132,134,133,54048,2314,4383,2427,13982,672,136230,57914,2428],"class_list":["post-455845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news","tag-county-commissioners","tag-criminal-justice","tag-district-attorney","tag-hays-county","tag-kyle","tag-police","tag-police-funding","tag-police-oversight","tag-san-marcos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/455846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}