Axon Insists Its AI Makes Police Reports Easier. Nothing Suggests It Makes Them Any *Better*

from the scaling-but-for-hallucinations dept

It’s not that AI can’t be useful or helpful in certain contexts. And this is certainly not to say AI can’t take over repetitive tasks to allow people to focus on things that need more of human touch.

The problem with AI isn’t necessarily AI itself. It’s that far too many tech companies are pitching AI as a one-size-fits-all solution to pretty much everything. And far too many entities are taking tech companies at their word, with disastrous results.

Axon (formerly Taser) has cornered the body cam market and is now trying to sweep up everything else. While it still hasn’t made a foray into facial recognition tech, it’s pitching products (Draft One and Form One) that use AI to automate report writing for police officers. Draft One has been pitched as a time-saver — one capable of transcribing body cam audio to generate police reports. The company’s CEO Rick Smith thinks this add-on to its body cam products with “potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time.”

Considering a lot of officers spend most of their time engaged in pretextual stops, this isn’t really good news. It just means officers will be able to violate rights more frequently with no perceivable benefit to public safety.

Then there’s the problem AI companies just can’t seem to solve, like extremely vivid hallucinations:

An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.

However, the truth behind that so-called magical transformation is simple.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,’” Sgt. Keel told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

Weirdly, this anecdote comes from the same law enforcement agency that claims AI-generated police reports keep this Utah city “safer.” The report doesn’t explain how this is being accomplished. Sgt. Keel simply says the tech saves him “6-8 hours a week.” Sgt. Keel does not explain what’s being done with these extra hours.

The other problem with relying on AI to generate police reports is that officers are generating a new layer of plausible deniability. If errors are found, cops can blame it on the algorithm. Beyond that, there are problems cops pretend don’t exist, like making any testimony reliant on AI-generated reports instantly suspect. If cops aren’t writing their own reports, they can’t possibly claim these statements are their own under oath.

But even if you ignore all of that and choose to focus on the things companies like Axon would prefer you to direct your focus to, we’re still not seeing the sort of improvement that would theoretically offset the downsides of relying on AI. Trial runs of Axon’s new Form One AI product haven’t exactly been a resounding success, as Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes.

[A]fter seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette’s officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn’t save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague.

That’s just the experience of a single town of 70,000 people in Indiana. Imagine having this amount of routine failure applied to departments with hundreds of officers and thousands of daily reports. What’s worse is that Form One is far less sophisticated than Draft One, which is used to transcribe body cam footage. The software is only expected to accurately add names and addresses to relevant sections of police reports. If it can’t be trusted to do this, there’s little reason to believe Draft One can provide an accurate accounting of a police stop by transcribing audio.

Axon claims these are not indicative of whatever the final product will be. According to the Axon spokesperson, Lafayette was granted “early access” to an (apparently) unfinished AI tool. Axon implies the final product will be better, but neither the Lafayette PD or Axon itself were willing to provide any info that might allow critics to move this from implication to inference.

Manchester, New Hampshire’s police department had roughly the same experience with Draft One.

Ian Adams, a former police officer and criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, studied the Manchester Police Department in New Hampshire’s use of Draft One. Adams analyzed time stamps for when officers started a report and when they filed it. Only some had access to the software. The study found that there was no improvement in how long it took for cops to file reports because they spent a significant amount of time editing the AI system’s work: removing irrelevant information, fixing inaccuracies and adding important facts it missed. “It was just easier to type the report themselves,” says Manchester’s Lieutenant Matthew Barter, who participated in the research.

Weirdly, most officers still thought Draft One sped up report writing, despite data showing otherwise. And even if officers were convinced Draft One was more efficient that simply writing reports themselves, the PD apparently decided the data was more accurate than a bunch of subjective opinions. And it wasn’t the only beta tester (so to speak) to do so:

Even though it was the first agency to test Axon’s Draft One, Manchester ditched it in 2024. The same year, the Anchorage Police Department in Alaska also decided to stop using it, citing zero time savings.

Presumably, these agencies weren’t required to pay for this subpar tech. And while it’s safe to say the tech will continue to improve, the question is whether it will ever be worth it. With fewer courts willing to accept AI-generated court filings and becoming increasingly skeptical of the tech in this context, cop shops are going to be paying for a product that generates reports they can’t submit as testimony or evidence.

Beyond that, the tech apparently needs so much human backstopping that the job of writing reports may as well just be handed back to the humans. Even if it does improve to the point that it can actually reduce the paperwork load on officers, no police department enthused about the tech has specified what will be done with all of this new free time. If it’s just going to be more of the same old policing, the public gains nothing but additional chances to have their rights violated. If the free time is going to be used to build community relationships and route more officers to investigations that might contribute to overall public safety, some sort of trade-off might be acceptable. But from what’s been demonstrated so far, AI is just compounding errors without providing any real usefulness to the communities these law enforcement agencies serve.

Filed Under: ai, body cameras, draft one, form one, law enforcement tech, police, police reports

Companies: axon