A D.C.-area law enforcement agency rolled out new policing tools that use AI. Police say the time saving is incredible and the accuracy is there — but opponents have privacy concerns and question whether AI’s integration will always remain impartial.
A February traffic stop in Northern Virginia presented an officer with an all-too-common problem: The driver didn’t speak English, and the officer didn’t speak Spanish.
“Good news: We have a solution for that,” the officer said.
The solution: Body-worn cameras equipped with AI.
The officer spoke into his bodycam, which translated to Spanish, and the language barrier was broken.
Following a pilot program, Fairfax County police are using AI-equipped body cameras to translate 57 languages.
“We had about an over 90% success rate and we looked at a variety of metrics to determine that, so really positive outcomes,” Sgt. Evan Brandolino with the Fairfax County Police Department said.
Fairfax also uses AI to assist 911, handling transcriptions and deploying drones to incidents. In some cases, the AI deploys a drone to a scene and the drone pilot has eyes on an incident before officers can arrive in person.
Then, after an incident, the AI in the body cameras, similar to the models that power ChatGPT, transcribes the entire incident and creates a first draft of a police report.
“We’ve seen incredible time savings for our officers, it allows them to get back on the street more quickly,” Brandolino said.
Fairfax County says it worked through county lawyers to make sure AI-drafted police reports, called Draft One, would hold up in court.
“We’ve had all sorts of cases go through the court process, now, where reports have been written with Draft One and we have not had any issues,” Brandolino said.
“Right now, officers are permitted to use Draft One for all incident types with the exception of homicides, sex offenses, and critical incidents such as officer-involved shootings.”
The department says safeguards are built in and proofreading is required for reports and AI-transcribed 911 calls.
“And one of the first things that we taught all of our personnel was that there may be a mistake in this, so what we’ve done is we use that to try to launch a drone more quickly to an emergency but we don’t 100% rely on that information,” Maj. Hudson Bull with the Fairfax County Police Department said.
Logan Seacrest, a scholar with R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, published an opinion piece Wednesday called “The Risky Marriage of AI and Police Reports,” outlining recent cases — none of them local — in which the AI got it wrong.
“There’s always this balance of power between the people and the government, and some of these AI technologies have the potential to tip that balance way in favor of the government,” Seacrest said.
Fairfax County police say while the agency hopes to lead the way in the use of new technology, it also wants to lead the way in best practices by using AI responsibly.
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