A controversial AI tool using body camera microphones could draft police reports in Lakeland.
This week, Lakeland’s city commission approved a new contract with police tech company Axon. The nearly $22 million dollar contract includes a controversial AI tool that generates police reports.
The new AI tool, called Axon Draft One, is already being used by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.
Draft One listens to conversations through body cameras and uses the dialogue to generate a report. The officer then has to certify that the report is accurate, but that can be as simple as clicking a button.
AI occasionally generates information that isn’t true. In Utah, Draft One wrote a report saying that an officer transformed into a frog. Police later said the body camera had picked up the movie playing in the background: The Princess and the Frog.
In Florida, police aren’t required to disclose which reports are generated with the use of AI. The original draft isn’t stored, making it difficult even for the police to tell which parts of a report were created by AI. Critics say the technology defies transparency by design.
Noah Spitzer-Williams, Axon’s senior product manager, advertised that feature in a 2024 roundtable discussion about Draft One.
“So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design,” he said. “And that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorneys offices.”
Opponents of the technology warn that it could make it harder to prosecute crimes, since defense attorneys can challenge the credibility of AI-generated police reports in court.