The police are increasingly relying on AI to prepare police reports. But does this bring new risks?

Writing an incident report can be extremely time-consuming for police officers. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, officers are now beginning to use AI chatbots to turn the hours-long task into one that takes just seconds.

Several companies, including Axon, the manufacturer of the Taser, have developed a program that uses the audio from a police officer's body camera and converts it into a report.

Thaddeus Johnson, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University and a former police officer, says this will save time for already overburdened police departments.

“Our response times can be longer the longer we are busy with reports, and these reports are so important because they form the fundamental basis for criminal justice proceedings,” Johnson said.

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Johnson said the technology also helps officers reveal things they may not remember.

“There were moments when I forgot things that happened during the incident. You suffer from auditory exclusion. You have tunnel vision,” Johnson said.

However, the use of software to document police operations also raises certain concerns. While the officer can edit the report before submitting it, the speech algorithm could misinterpret the meaning or context of the dialogue on the body camera.

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A blog post on the website of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, addresses the concerns the author saw about the technology: “Integrating AI into police incident reports could make an already complicated system even more vulnerable to abuse.”

Axon says it has safeguards in place to protect against bias and ensure accuracy.

The Oklahoma City Police Department is currently experimenting with incident reporting technology, but says it only uses the technology for “minor reports of incidents that do not result in an arrest.”