Police officers have begun using artificial intelligence to write police reports

The world of artificial intelligence has seemingly entered the realm of law enforcement as some police officers have reported turning to chatbots to write police reports.

Several police departments across the nation have sought to implement modern technology into law enforcement and have experimented with using AI to write a first draft of police reports. The Oklahoma City Police Department is one of the units testing the technology and has been pleased with the results so far, according to multiple reports.

One police officer shared his experience using AI with the Associated Press. Sgt. Matt Gilmore of the Oklahoma City Police Department K-9 unit detailed using the technology after being involved in a suspect search for approximately an hour with his dog Gunner.

The department’s AI tool used the recorded audio picked up from the microphone in Gilmore’s body camera to produce a draft of the police report in less than 10 seconds, according to the Associated Press. Gilmore said writing a report without AI usually takes 30 to 45 minutes.

“It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate,” Gilmore said . “It flowed better. It even documented a fact he didn’t remember hearing — another officer’s mention of the color of the car the suspects ran from.”

Many law enforcement officers who have tried AI chatbots to write drafts of political reports share Gilmore’s enthusiasm for the technology, according to the Associated Press, expressing delight with how it helps save significant time in otherwise tedious work.

“They 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, the company that developed this AI product known as Draft One.

However, others are not so enthralled with AI and have expressed concerns that its use could be problematic within the criminal justice system. Some prosecutors, legal scholars, and police watchdog organizations worry about how the details created by AI in the police report, an integral part of many criminal investigations, could affect a trial, which could determine a suspect’s fate and life.

“Now, there’s certainly concerns,” Smith said. “They never want to get an officer on the stand who says, well, ‘The AI wrote that. I didn’t.’”

Current AI technology used by law enforcement, such as those used to scan license plates or recognize suspects’ faces, has come under scrutiny because of these concerns. Experts in the criminal justice field and lawmakers have analyzed these tools to develop safeguards and restrictions that protect a person's privacy and civil rights. However, with Draft One, as well as with other AI applications used to produce police report drafts, the technology is such a recent development that there are limited rules and guidelines, if any.

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Due to this newness, the Oklahoma City Police Department confirmed that Draft One is not used on “high-stakes criminal cases.”

“So no arrests, no felonies, no violent crimes,” said Capt. Jason Bussert, the officer responsible for information technology in the department.