Prosecutors In Washington State Tell Cops They’d Better Not Be Using AI To Write Their Reports

Axon — having apparently exhausted the market for Tasers — has moved on to hawking body cameras to police departments. The cameras are the loss leaders. The real money comes from perpetual service contracts and access fees. With every new feature added to Axon’s line of products, the difficulty level of switching manufacturers and service providers increases.

And that’s exactly why Axon decided to add some AI to the mix. It’s one more thing that, once established, would be nearly impossible to easily replace on the fly, should a law enforcement agency consider taking their business to a competitor.

The AI isn’t there to help identify objects or people captured by Axon’s body cams (although that’s likely on its way as well). Axon thinks the future of policing involves trimming the time officers spend writing reports, theoretically freeing them up to do more policing and less paperwork.

But few people seem quite as thrilled by this next iteration of Axon services as Axon’s CEO.

On Tuesday, Axon, the $22 billion police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. “If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time to be back out policing,” Smith said.

Well, given the number of debacles creating by over-reliance on AI, this hardly seems like an ideal growth market. But Axon seems pretty convinced cops will grow to love this tech tool. And they might! After all, they’re not nearly as concerned about the collateral damage AI-enhanced report writing might cause as the people who are the most likely victims of this collateral damage… which would be pretty much everyone but the cops themselves.

Fortunately, there’s already been some pushback against Axon’s shiny new toy. And it comes from kind of an unexpected source: prosecutors. Law enforcement agencies in Washington State’s most populous county are being told in no uncertain terms, AI-crafted police reports are not welcome here. (h/t EFF)

The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (KCPAO) has instructed police agencies to not use Artificial Intelligence (AI) when writing reports.

In a memo to police chiefs sent this week, Chief Deputy Prosecutor Daniel J. Clark said any reports written with the assistance of AI will be rejected due to the possibility of errors.

“We do not fear advances in technology – but we do have legitimate concerns about some of the products on the market now,” Clark’s memo states. “AI continues to develop and we are hopeful that we will reach a point in the near future where these reports can be relied on. For now, our office has made the decision not to accept any police narratives that were produced with the assistance of AI.”

What’s being stated here isn’t speculation. It’s already happened. Clark cited an AI-assisted report received by prosecutors that referenced an officer who wasn’t actually at the scene.

Axon, however, still remains bullish on its new offering. Its statement in response to this announcement by the KCPAO says a lot of things that sound meaningful, but are ultimately meaningless once you understand every asserted backstop relies on cops doing their job thoroughly, honestly, and competently.

“Agencies have various considerations when implementing new public safety technology and Axon is dedicated to offering comprehensive resources to support them throughout this process as well as addressing questions or concerns. With Draft One, initial report narratives are drafted strictly from the audio transcript from the body-worn camera recording and Axon calibrated the underlying model for Draft One to minimize speculation or embellishments. Police narrative reports continue to be the responsibility of officers and critical safeguards require every report to be edited, reviewed and approved by a human officer, ensuring accuracy and accountability of the information. Axon rigorously tests our AI-enabled products and adheres to a set of guiding principles to ensure we innovate responsibly, including building in controls so that human decision-making is never removed in critical moments.“

Police reports have never been the paragon of accuracy. And when cops need to cover something up, they’re filled with deliberate misstatements (we call those “lies” in the civilian world) and omissions. Claiming adding AI to the mix will ultimately be OK because cops are the final backstop for accuracy belies a willful ignorance of how this process works in the real world.

The only meaningful move being made here is the ban on AI-assisted reports by prosecutors. This means any agency that’s currently paying for Draft One access should — if the King County prosecutor’s office is serious about this — have all of its reports rejected out-of-hand until access is removed and/or Draft One contracts are terminated.

So, for now, King County will only allow human-generated narrative “hallucinations” to be used during prosecutions. And while it’s not much to cheer about, at least it prevents officers from distancing themselves from their lies by blaming software for inconsistencies in their statements.