LEANDER, Texas (KXAN) — At the Leander Police Department (LPD), long-time employee Luana Wilcox, the administrative analyst, is the go-to for all things innovation.
“I was an officer for 17-and-a-half years,” she said. “I’m the person who’s been doing all of our technical stuff, so they created a civilian position to specifically focus on those components.”
She got a firsthand look at how a new program called Draft One works. Axon, a company that makes law enforcement body cameras and other police products, created it. According to Axon, the program can draft police reports – in seconds – based on body camera audio.
“The program is actually trained off of actual officer reports and actual narratives that the AI can read and listen to and create a format that says things in a way that officers would write them,” Wilcox said.
She calls it a crucial time-saving measure given that the law enforcement industry nationwide continues to face staffing struggles.
“We have an ever-increasing city so there’s been an increase in just the number of reports we have to take,” she said.
The department addressed Draft One with local prosecutors’ offices, according to LPD.
“What we got from prosecutors is that they’re uncomfortable,” Wilcox said, summing up the response.
Logan Campbell, a former prosecutor and current defense attorney, has concerns about using AI in the police-report space in general.
“You miss out on the human element of this, you have someone’s liberty, someone’s freedom at stake,” he said.
While he said police reports, in general, aren’t typically admissible in court anyway, he said they still impact prosecutors’ and defense attorneys’ actions in other ways.
“You also have probable cause affidavits where judges are reviewing it to see if probable cause exists for an arrest or a search warrant,” Campbell said. “It’s a scary thought to think it’s not the police officers themselves making the report, it’s in fact AI or a computer generating the report.”
According to an Axon spokesperson, the below safeguards are in place to ensure accuracy. The bullet points are quoted from Axon’s press release on the software.
- Officer required to review and sign-off: Once the report narrative has been edited and key information has been added, officers are required to sign-off on the report’s accuracy before submitting for the next round of human review.
- Adheres to the audio data: Report narratives are drafted strictly from the audio transcript from the body-worn camera recording. Axon calibrated the underlying model for Draft One to prevent speculation or embellishments.
- Controls to ensure proofreading: Each draft includes placeholders that officers are required to edit, by either adding more information or removing the placeholder.
- Report drafts are restricted to minor incidents and charges: The default experience limits report drafts to minor incident types and charge levels, specifically excluding incidents where arrests took place and for felonies.
Wilcox said before local agencies start using Draft One, it will have to go through various levels of approval.
“There is a set process within the criminal justice system to accept certain technology,” she said.
Out of all of the Central Texas agencies we heard back from regarding this product, Leander was the only one looking specifically into Draft One.
The Austin Police Department said it “is looking to be involved in larger conversations centered around AI with our City leadership. The Austin Police Department is weighing the pros and cons related to different aspects of the work we do from an investigative standpoint. With technology evolving quickly, it would make sense to explore how AI could benefit us as law enforcement agency to make us more efficient and effective. Any use would need to be evaluated as part of a Citywide approval process.”