WHEAT RIDGE, Colo. — Wheat Ridge police have joined the list of departments across the state turning to artificial intelligence to generate reports.
There's a lot of skepticism around it. That's why the spokesperson for the Wheat Ridge Police Department Alex Rose is committed to transparency and allowing us to see exactly how it works.
Denver7 worked alongside Officer Alan Hernandez to create a mock welfare check all captured on body camera video.
During the interaction, Hernandez checked on Denver7's Allie Jennerjahn who told him it was hot, she wasn't feeling well and her friend was meeting her at the park in 20 minutes with a bottle of water.
"Alright I’ll hang out with you until then. That way nothing happens to you," Hernandez said on the body cam.
He took down Allie's name, number, birthday and made observations of what she was wearing.
The conversation was brief, but a police report still had to be made.
"Axon is a company that provides our body worn cameras. They provide body worn cameras, likely for dozens, if not hundreds, of law enforcement agencies in Colorado and certainly across the country," Rose explained. "So we already have an existing contract with Axon, but they rolled out this new platform, which basically takes the audio and the video that is pumped into the body cam and uses artificial intelligence to create an initial first draft of a police report based off that information and the GPS data."
Hernandez demonstrated how it worked. He uploaded the video to the system and it very quickly generated a report that included every detail previously mentioned.
The program — Draft One — also prompted Hernandez to input his own details of what happened and add additional information a body worn camera can't pick up like smells.
"We don't let the AI dictate everything. There has to be human oversight, and we built that into our policy here at the department," Rose said.
The system also purposefully put sentences that made no sense in the middle of the report that officers have to find and correct before they can move forward.
"Every single one of our officers knows that they need to be accountable to every single word in their reports. And this isn't a substitute for good police work. It's a supplement to it," Rose said.
Some defense attorneys, though, are skeptical.
"When there's that level of disconnect, and you don't have the direct human connection anymore. I think that that just creates a possibility for a whole, a whole host of problems," Anna Trobee, senior associate attorney with Robinson & Henry P.C., said.
She said police reports are the backbone of a case, and if artificial intelligence is helping to create them, she fears officers on the witness stand will use it to dodge a question.
"Up until this point, you have a police officer who is testifying on the stand to what they recall about the facts and circumstances of the case. Now there's no longer that person that's accountable for what's written in the report, right? You can have a police officer on the stand who says, well, that's not exactly what happened. If you review my body worn camera, you know, that'll be exactly what happened," Trobee said.
She said it does create opportunities to poke holes in the prosecution's case but wants a commitment to accuracy to come first.
"I think the AI is a great tool. But in this line of work, you're dealing with human beings, and you're dealing with people's lives," Trobee said. "If it's you and your rights being impacted, right, do you want to be that last report that that officer is going through and just like typing in whatever they need to?"
The program is paid for by taxpayers and costs the department $100,000 a year. Rose said that's 1% of the department's budget.
