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

One police officer shared his experience using AI with the Associated Press. Sergeant 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 ten seconds, according to the Associated Press. Gilmore said that writing a report usually took 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.”

According to the Associated Press, many law enforcement officers who have tried AI chatbots to write drafts of political reports share Gilmore’s enthusiasm for the technology. They have expressed 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 chief executive officer 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 ultimately be problematic within the criminal justice system. Some prosecutors, legal scholars, police watchdog organizations, and other groups worry about how the details created by AI in the police report, an integral part of many criminal investigations, could potentially affect a trial, which could determine a suspect’s fate and life. 

“Now, there’s certainly concerns,” Smith told the Associated Press. “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 an individual’s privacy and civil rights. However, with Draft One, and any other similar AI applications used to produce police report drafts, the technology is such a recent development that there are limited rules and guidelines, if any, currently in use, the Associated Press reported.

Due to this newness, the police department confirmed to the Associated Press that Draft One is currently not used on “high-stakes criminal cases.”

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