Another police department has agreed to a contract with Axon Enterprise to allow AI software to draft police reports using body camera footage and audio.
This time it’s the Cloquet Police Department who are handing much of the police report generation duties over to artificial intelligence. The Cloquet City Council voted 5-1 to approve the police department’s 34-month contact with Axon Enterprise’s Draft One AI software program. Leaders at the department believe the AI program will help streamline officers’ workloads and free up police hours that can be better used to serve the community.
“This technology super trend is obviously slow to get to law enforcement, but it’s slowly making its way,” Cloquet Police Chief Derek Randall said. “Obviously, with us being a smaller community, fewer folks, we’re a little bit behind the times.”
The 34-month contract comes with a price tag just shy of $65,000.
Streamlining Report Generation
The Cloquet Police Department trialed the Draft One software for two months and said that it can greatly reduce the time it takes to generate a police report, cutting it down from several hours or days to just under an hour in some instances.
“This makes (police) more efficient, this makes our budget better, this allows us a little bit of a bridge in a time where we are struggling and every other department is struggling to find officers,” City Administrator Tim Peterson said. “I think that this is something that we need to do for our police department, and is the responsible thing to do for our officers.”
Not all are pleased with the deal, however. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group dedicated to protecting digital rights, claims that Draft One is deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public.
“There is no meaningful way to audit Draft One usage, whether you’re a police chief or an independent researcher, because Axon designed it that way,” an EFF report states.
Peterson claims that the Cloquet PD will still remain committed to transparency.
“We would still fall back on the same exact policies, the same exact state statutes and data request policies that we have,” he said. “It wouldn’t make it more available or less available. We would follow the exact same policies and procedures that we have for people having access to it.”
Although the AI software will assist with report generation, these reports will need to be reviewed and edited by an officer before being approved as a final version. How committed police are at determining AI accuracy will play a big role in ensuring this assistive technology is harnessed for good. AI makes plenty of mistakes, and if humans aren’t there to catch and correct these mistakes, the public and individual freedoms will suffer. We’ll keep tabs on this program and if any other police departments across Minnesota follow suit.
For now, if you or someone you know needs a human to assist with a criminal matter, trust the experienced team of attorneys at Appelman Law Firm today at (952) 224-2277.
