Police departments across U.S. are starting to use artificial intelligence to write crime reports
With law enforcement focused on reducing crime rates and budget pressures, while recruiting and retaining staff, technology companies are having some early success selling artificial intelligence tools to police departments, especially to ease the burden of administrative work.
Axon , widely recognized for its Taser devices and body cameras, was among the first companies to introduce AI specifically for the most common police task: report writing. Its tool, Draft One, generates police narratives directly from Axon's bodycam audio. Currently, the AI is being piloted by 75 officers across several police departments, including Fort Collins, Colorado; Lafayette, Indiana; and East Palo Alto, California.
Axon CEO Rick Smith said it is restricted to drafting reports for only minor incidents so agencies can get comfortable with the tool before expanding to more complex cases. Early feedback, he added, indicates that Draft One reduces report-writing time by more than 60%, potentially cutting the average time for report completion from 23 minutes to just 8 minutes.
"The hours saved comes out to about 45 hours per police officer per month," said Sergeant Robert Younger of the Fort Collins Police Department, an early adopter of the tool. "When I first tested it myself, I was absolutely floored, because the draft report was incredibly accurate. There weren't any suppositions or guesses about what somebody was thinking or feeling or looked like or anything like that. The information it provided in that draft report was a very well-written, balanced report, chronological in order, based on facts, with an intro and an outcome," he said, adding that the draft was produced in under 10 seconds.
