It’s not that AI can’t be useful or helpful in certain contexts. And this is certainly not to say AI can’t take over repetitive tasks to allow people to focus on things that need more of human touch.
The problem with AI isn’t necessarily AI itself. It’s that far too many tech companies are pitching AI as a one-size-fits-all solution to pretty much everything. And far too many entities are taking tech companies at their word, with disastrous results.
Axon (formerly Taser) has cornered the body cam market and is now trying to sweep up everything else. While it still hasn’t made a foray into facial recognition tech, it’s pitching products (Draft One and Form One) that use AI to automate report writing for police officers. Draft One has been pitched as a time-saver — one capable of transcribing body cam audio to generate police reports. The company’s CEO Rick Smith thinks this add-on to its body cam products with “potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time.”
Considering a lot of officers spend most of their time engaged in pretextual stops, this isn’t really good news. It just means officers will be able to violate rights more frequently with no perceivable benefit to public safety.
An artificial intelligence that writes police reports had some explaining to do earlier this month after it claimed a Heber City officer had shape-shifted into a frog.
However, the truth behind that so-called magical transformation is simple.
“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” Sgt. Keel told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”
Weirdly, this anecdote comes from the same law enforcement agency that claims AI-generated police reports keep this Utah city “safer.” The report doesn’t explain how this is being accomplished. Sgt. Keel simply says the tech saves him “6-8 hours a week.” Sgt. Keel does not explain what’s being done with these extra hours.
The other problem with relying on AI to generate police reports is that officers are generating a new layer of plausible deniability. If errors are found, cops can blame it on the algorithm. Beyond that, there are problems cops pretend don’t exist, like making any testimony reliant on AI-generated reports instantly suspect. If cops aren’t writing their own reports, they can’t possibly claim these statements are their own under oath.
But even if you ignore all of that and choose to focus on the things companies like Axon would prefer you to direct your focus to, we’re still not seeing the sort of improvement that would theoretically offset the downsides of relying on AI. Trial runs of Axon’s new Form One AI product haven’t exactly been a resounding success, as Thomas Brewster reports for Forbes.
[A]fter seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette’s officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn’t save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague.
That’s just the experience of a single town of 70,000 people in Indiana. Imagine having this amount of routine failure applied to departments with hundreds of officers and thousands of daily reports. What’s worse is that Form One is far less sophisticated than Draft One, which is used to transcribe body cam footage. The software is only expected to accurately add names and addresses to relevant sections of police reports. If it can’t be trusted to do this, there’s little reason to believe Draft One can provide an accurate accounting of a police stop by transcribing audio.
Axon claims these are not indicative of whatever the final product will be. According to the Axon spokesperson, Lafayette was granted “early access” to an (apparently) unfinished AI tool. Axon implies the final product will be better, but neither the Lafayette PD or Axon itself were willing to provide any info that might allow critics to move this from implication to inference.
Manchester, New Hampshire’s police department had roughly the same experience with Draft One.
Ian Adams, a former police officer and criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, studied the Manchester Police Department in New Hampshire’s use of Draft One. Adams analyzed time stamps for when officers started a report and when they filed it. Only some had access to the software. The study found that there was no improvement in how long it took for cops to file reports because they spent a significant amount of time editing the AI system’s work: removing irrelevant information, fixing inaccuracies and adding important facts it missed. “It was just easier to type the report themselves,” says Manchester’s Lieutenant Matthew Barter, who participated in the research.
Weirdly, most officers still thought Draft One sped up report writing, despite data showing otherwise. And even if officers were convinced Draft One was more efficient that simply writing reports themselves, the PD apparently decided the data was more accurate than a bunch of subjective opinions. And it wasn’t the only beta tester (so to speak) to do so:
Even though it was the first agency to test Axon’s Draft One, Manchester ditched it in 2024. The same year, the Anchorage Police Department in Alaska also decided to stop using it, citing zero time savings.
Presumably, these agencies weren’t required to pay for this subpar tech. And while it’s safe to say the tech will continue to improve, the question is whether it will ever be worth it. With fewer courts willing to accept AI-generated court filings and becoming increasingly skeptical of the tech in this context, cop shops are going to be paying for a product that generates reports they can’t submit as testimony or evidence.
Beyond that, the tech apparently needs so much human backstopping that the job of writing reports may as well just be handed back to the humans. Even if it does improve to the point that it can actually reduce the paperwork load on officers, no police department enthused about the tech has specified what will be done with all of this new free time. If it’s just going to be more of the same old policing, the public gains nothing but additional chances to have their rights violated. If the free time is going to be used to build community relationships and route more officers to investigations that might contribute to overall public safety, some sort of trade-off might be acceptable. But from what’s been demonstrated so far, AI is just compounding errors without providing any real usefulness to the communities these law enforcement agencies serve.
Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found.
Our review of public records from police agencies already using the technology — including police reports, emails, procurement documents, department policies, software settings, and more — as well as Axon’s own user manuals and marketing materials revealed that it’s often impossible to tell which parts of a police report were generated by AI and which parts were written by an officer.
You can read our full report, which details what we found in those documents, how we filed those public records requests, and how you can file your own, here.
Everyone should have access to answers, evidence, and data regarding the effectiveness and dangers of this technology. Axon and its customers claim this technology will revolutionize policing, but it remains to be seen how it will change the criminal justice system, and who this technology benefits most.
For months, EFF and other organizations have warned about the threats this technology poses to accountability and transparency in an already flawed criminal justice system. Now we’ve concluded the situation is even worse than we thought: There is no meaningful way to audit Draft One usage, whether you’re a police chief or an independent researcher, because Axon designed it that way.
Draft One uses a ChatGPT variant to process body-worn camera audio of public encounters and create police reports based only on the captured verbal dialogue; it does not process the video. The Draft One-generated text is sprinkled with bracketed placeholders that officers are encouraged to add additional observations or information—or can be quickly deleted. Officers are supposed to edit Draft One’s report and correct anything the Gen AI misunderstood due to a lack of context, troubled translations, or just plain-old mistakes. When they’re done, the officer is prompted to sign an acknowledgement that the report was generated using Draft One and that they have reviewed the report and made necessary edits to ensure it is consistent with the officer’s recollection. Then they can copy and paste the text into their report. When they close the window, the draft disappears.
Any new, untested, and problematic technology needs a robust process to evaluate its use by officers. In this case, one would expect police agencies to retain data that ensures officers are actually editing the AI-generated reports as required, or that officers can accurately answer if a judge demands to know whether, or which part of, reports used by the prosecution were written by AI.
One would expect audit systems to be readily available to police supervisors, researchers, and the public, so that anyone can make their own independent conclusions. And one would expect that Draft One would make it easy to discern its AI product from human product – after all, even your basic, free word processing software can track changes and save a document history.
But Draft One defies all these expectations, offering meager oversight features that deliberately conceal how it is used.
So when a police report includes biased language, inaccuracies, misinterpretations, or even outright lies, the record won’t indicate whether the officer or the AI is to blame. That makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to assess how the system affects justice outcomes, because there is little non-anecdotal data from which to determine whether the technology is junk.
The disregard for transparency is perhaps best encapsulated by a short email that an administrator in the Frederick Police Department in Colorado, one of Axon’s first Draft One customers, sent to a company representative after receiving a public records request related to AI-generated reports.
“We love having new toys until the public gets wind of them,” the administrator wrote.
No Record of Who Wrote What
The first question anyone should have about a police report written using Draft One is which parts were written by AI and which were added by the officer. Once you know this, you can start to answer more questions, like:
Are officers meaningfully editing and adding to the AI draft? Or are they reflexively rubber-stamping the drafts to move on as quickly as possible?
How often are officers finding and correcting errors made by the AI, and are there patterns to these errors?
If there is inappropriate language or a fabrication in the final report, was it introduced by the AI or the officer?
Is the AI overstepping in its interpretation of the audio? If a report says, “the subject made a threatening gesture,” was that added by the officer, or did the AI make a factual assumption based on the audio? If a suspect uses metaphorical slang, does the AI document literally? If a subject says “yeah” through a conversation as a verbal acknowledgement that they’re listening to what the officer says, is that interpreted as an agreement or a confession?
Ironically, Draft One does not save the first draft it generates. Nor does the system store any subsequent versions. Instead, the officer copies and pastes the text into the police report, and the previous draft, originally created by Draft One, disappears as soon as the window closes. There is no log or record indicating which portions of a report were written by the computer and which portions were written by the officer, except for the officer’s own recollection. If an officer generates a Draft One report multiple, there’s no way to tell whether the AI interprets the audio differently each time.
Axon is open about not maintaining these records, at least when it markets directly to law enforcement.
In this video of a roundtable discussion about the Draft One product, Axon’s senior principal product manager for generative AI is asked (at the 49:47 mark) whether or not it’s possible to see after-the-fact which parts of the report were suggested by the AI and which were edited by the officer. His response (bold and definition of RMS added):
“So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices—so basically the officer generates that draft, they make their edits, if they submit it into our Axon records system then that’s the only place we store it, if they copy and paste it into their third-party RMS [records management system] system as soon as they’re done with that and close their browser tab, it’s gone. It’s actually never stored in the cloud at all so you don’t have to worry about extra copies floating around.”
To reiterate: Axon deliberately does not store the original draft written by the Gen AI, because “the last thing” they want is for cops to have to provide that data to anyone (say, a judge, defense attorney or civil liberties non-profit).
Following up on the same question, Axon’s Director of Strategic Relationships at Axon Justice suggests this is fine, since a police officer using a word processor wouldn’t be required to save every draft of a police report as they’re re-writing it. This is, of course, misdirection and not remotely comparable. An officer with a word processor is one thought process and a record created by one party; Draft One is two processes from two parties–Axon and the officer. Ultimately, it could and should be considered two records: the version sent to the officer from Axon and the version edited by the officer.
The days of there being unexpected consequences of police departments writing reports in word processors may be over, but Draft One is still unproven. After all, every AI-evangelist, including Axon, claims this technology is a game-changer. So, why wouldn’t an agency want to maintain a record that can establish the technology’s accuracy?
It also appears that Draft One isn’t simply hewing to long–establishednorms of police report-writing; it may fundamentally change them. In one email, the Campbell Police Department’s Police Records Supervisor tells staff, “You may notice a significant difference with the narrative format…if the DA’s office has comments regarding our report narratives, please let me know.” It’s more than a little shocking that a police department would implement such a change without fully soliciting and addressing the input of prosecutors. In this case, the Santa Clara County District Attorney had already suggested police include a disclosure when Axon Draft One is used in each report, but Axon’s engineers had yet to finalize the feature at the time it was rolled out.
One of the main concerns, of course, is that this system effectively creates a smokescreen over truth-telling in police reports. If an officer lies or uses inappropriate language in a police report, who is to say that the officer wrote it or the AI? An officer can be punished severely for official dishonesty, but the consequences may be more lenient for a cop who blames it on the AI. There has already been an occasion when engineers discovered a bug that allowed officers on at least three occasions to circumvent the “guardrails” that supposedly deter officers from submitting AI-generated reports without reading them first, as Axon disclosed to the Frederick Police Department.
To serve and protect the public interest, the AI output must be continually and aggressively evaluated whenever and wherever it’s used. But Axon has intentionally made this difficult.
What the Audit Trail Actually Looks Like
You may have seen news stories or other public statements asserting that Draft One does, indeed, have auditing features. So, we dug through the user manuals to figure out what that exactly means.
The first thing to note is that, based on our review of the documentation, there appears to be no feature in Axon software that allows departments to export a list of all police officers who have used Draft One. Nor is it possible to export a list of all reports created by Draft One, unless the department has customized its process (we’ll get to that in a minute).
This is disappointing because, without this information, it’s near impossible to do even the most basic statistical analysis: how many officers are using the technology and how often.
Based on the documentation, you can only export two types of very basic logs, with the process differing depending on whether an agency uses Evidence or Records/Standards products. These are:
A log of basic actions taken on a particular report. If the officer requested a Draft One report or signed the Draft One liability disclosure related to the police report, it will show here. But nothing more than that.
A log of an individual officer/user’s basic activity in the Axon Evidence/Records system. This audit log shows things such as when an officer logs into the system, uploads videos, or accesses a piece of evidence. The only Draft One-related activities this tracks are whether the officer ran a Draft One request, signed the Draft One liability disclosure, or changed the Draft One settings.
This means that, to do a comprehensive review, an evaluator may need to go through the record management system and look up each officer individually to identify whether that officer used Draft One and when. That could mean combing through dozens, hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of individual user logs.
An example of Draft One usage in an audit log.
An auditor could also go report-by-report as well to see which ones involved Draft One, but the sheer number of reports generated by an agency means this method would require a massive amount of time.
But can agencies even create a list of police reports that were co-written with AI? It depends on whether the agency has included a disclosure in the body of the text, such as “I acknowledge this report was generated from a digital recording using Draft One by Axon.” If so, then an administrator can use “Draft One” as a keyword search to find relevant reports.
Agencies that do not require that language told us they could not identify which reports were written with Draft One. For example, one of those agencies and one of Axon’s most promoted clients, the Lafayette Police Department in Indiana, told us:
“Regarding the attached request, we do not have the ability to create a list of reports created through Draft One. They are not searchable. This request is now closed.”
Meanwhile, in response to a similar public records request, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, which does require a disclosure at the bottom of each report that it had been written by AI, was able to isolate more than 3,000 Draft One reports generated between December 2024 and March 2025.
They told us: “We are able to do a keyword and a timeframe search. I used the words draft one and the system generated all the draft one reports for that timeframe.”
We have requested further clarification from Axon, but they have yet to respond.
However, as we learned from email exchanges between the Frederick Police Department in Colorado and Axon, Axon is tracking police use of the technology at a level that isn’t available to the police department itself.
In response to a request from Politico’s Alfred Ng in August 2024 for Draft One-generated police reports, the police department was struggling to isolate those reports.
An Axon representative responded: “Unfortunately, there’s no filter for DraftOne reports so you’d have to pull a User’s audit trail and look for Draft One entries. To set expectations, it’s not going to be graceful, but this wasn’t a scenario we anticipated needing to make easy.”
But then, Axon followed up: “We track which reports use Draft One internally so I exported the data.” Then, a few days later, Axon provided Frederick with some custom JSON code to extract the data in the future.
What is Being Done About Draft One
The California Assembly is currently considering SB 524, a bill that addresses transparency measures for AI-written police reports. The legislation would require disclosure whenever police use artificial intelligence to partially or fully write official reports, as well as “require the first draft created to be retained for as long as the final report is retained.” Because Draft One is designed not to retain the first or any previous drafts of a report, it cannot comply with this common-sense and first-step bill, and any law enforcement usage would be unlawful.
Axon markets Draft One as a solution to a problem police have been complaining about for at least a century: that they do too much paperwork. Or, at least, they spend too much time doing paperwork. The current research on whether Draft One remedies this issue shows mixed results, from some agencies claiming it has no real-time savings, with others agencies extolling its virtues (although their data also shows that results vary even within the department).
In the justice system, police must prioritize accuracy over speed. Public safety and a trustworthy legal system demand quality over corner-cutting. Time saved should not be the only metric, or even the most important one. It’s like evaluating a drive-through restaurant based only on how fast the food comes out, while deliberately concealing the ingredients and nutritional information and failing to inspect whether the kitchen is up to health and safety standards.
Given how untested this technology is and how much the company is in a hurry to sell Draft One, many local lawmakers and prosecutors have taken it upon themselves to try to regulate the product’s use. Utah is currently considering a bill that would mandate disclosure for any police reports generated by AI, thus sidestepping one of the current major transparency issues: it’s nearly impossible to tell which finished reports started as an AI draft.
We do not fear advances in technology – but we do have legitimate concerns about some of the products on the market now… AI continues to develop and we are hopeful that we will reach a point in the near future where these reports can be relied on. For now, our office has made the decision not to accept any police narratives that were produced with the assistance of AI.
We urge other prosecutors to follow suit and demand that police in their jurisdiction not unleash this new, unaccountable, and intentionally opaque AI product.
Conclusion
Police should not be using AI to write police reports. There are just too many unanswered questions about how AI would translate the audio of situations and whether police will actually edit those drafts, while simultaneously, there is no way for the public to reliably discern what was written by a person and what was written by a computer. This is before we even get to the question of how these reports might compound and exacerbate existing problems or create new ones in an already unfair and untransparent criminal justice system.
EFF will continue to research and advocate against the use of this technology but for now, the lesson is clear: Anyone with control or influence over police departments, be they lawmakers or people in the criminal justice system, has a duty to be informed about the potential harms and challenges posed by AI-written police reports.
The DEA may not be an early adopter of forward-looking policies, but it certainly leads the pack when it comes to shedding accountability like a teen ditching an ill-fitting sports coat the instant a family portrait session has wrapped up.
Federal law enforcement agencies definitely trailed the trends when it came to body cam use by officers. For years, the DOJ forbade local cops from using their body cameras during joint task force operations involving federal officers. It wasn’t until November 2020 that it agreed local officers could use their cameras in joint operations, but only if they agreed to play by the DOJ’s extremely stringent rules.
It took nearly another year before the DOJ agreed to start outfitting its own agencies with body cameras — something undoubtedly provoked by several months of intense civil unrest following the murder of unarmed Black man George Floyd by Minneapolis (MN) police officer Derek Chauvin.
Now that Trump has undone anything with Biden’s name on it, the DEA has informed its officers that body cams are no longer part of the federal drug enforcement process, as Mario Ariza reports for ProPublica:
The Drug Enforcement Administration has quietly ended its body camera program barely four years after it began, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica.
On April 2, DEA headquarters emailed employees announcing that the program had been terminated effective the day before. The DEA has not publicly announced the policy change, but by early April, links to pages about body camera policies on the DEA’s website were broken.
The email said the agency made the change to be “consistent” with a Trump executive order rescinding the 2022 requirement that all federal law enforcement agents use body cameras.
The DEA told its employees this vanishing was required to be “consistent” with Trump’s repeal of a Biden police accountability executive order. But ProPublica reports at least two other federal law enforcement agencies are still requiring officers to wear body cameras. One would assume the other agencies will follow the DEA’s lead and do the same, even if there’s nothing in Trump’s Biden order rollback or even the president’s more recent “GO POLICE STATE!” executive order that forbids the use of body cameras by federal officers.
While the DEA is taking the lead on the domestic-facing side when it comes to ditching the BWC-based pretense of accountability, it’s following the trail set by one of the most-reviled federal agencies in the nation:
In early February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, was one of the first agencies to get rid of its body cameras. Subsequent videos show plainclothes immigration agents making arrests with no visible body cameras.
Of course it was. ICE doesn’t just make policies vanish. It makes human beings disappear. The last thing DHS and ICE need are a bunch of unblinking eyes creating a permanent record of extrajudicial arrests and renditionings.
Federal law enforcement is going dark again, returning to its normal state of nigh-impenetrable opacity. Trump and his team have reset the clock, rolling back the most minimal of gains in law enforcement accountability just because he and his administration love government thuggery more than they love this country or the millions of regular people they’re supposed to be serving.
It took years for the federal government to engage in an extremely timid roll out of tech that regular cops had been using for most of the past decade. It took only a few weeks to undo three years of progress. And when agencies were given the option to shed themselves of devices officers often consider to be impositions, they acted immediately, completely disregarding even the DOJ’s own assertions about the positive aspects of body-worn cameras. It’s 2025, but the DOJ has been given permission to pretend it’s 2015 all over again.
Even though corrections officers seem to feel these devices will help them more than they will hurt them, the Colorado Department of Corrections has decided it’s not going to equip officers with body cameras. This is a pretty terrible outcome, especially since the DOC has spent a couple years and half-million dollars on build-up before unceremoniously dropping the program.
The reasons for equipping probation and corrections officers make sense. An earlier report on body cam use in youth correction programs pointed out some very positive outcomes. In response to a scathing oversight report, the head of Youth Services said as recently as last July that the state’s youth correction programs would actually benefit from the use of body cams.
Cameras inside the state’s youth detention centers capture video, but not audio, which means any investigation into the use of restraints or physical force against youth is incomplete, the ombudsman said in a fiery brief issued Tuesday.
In response, the director of the Division of Youth Services said he’s already working on it. Anders Jacobson told The Colorado Sun that he is making plans to buy tiny cameras that attach to belt loops and discreetly collect video and audio of encounters between employees and young people who are in detention.
Adding cameras to the mix would help confirm or deny claims made against corrections officers (several complaints of excessive force and racist language have been made by inmates), as well as provide coverage (and audio) in areas where cameras aren’t in place.
Even if corrections officers believe cameras are “just out to get them,” their mere presence tends to have a deterrent effect on violent acts by inmates.
In Ohio, staff at the Indian River Juvenile Correctional Facility began wearing cameras in 2022 after 12 youths barricaded themselves in a school building. Within a year, the center reported a 31% decrease in violence against staff.
If nothing else, this sort of data should have nudged the Colorado DOC towards deployment of the hundreds of cameras it already had on hand. Add to that the unexpected situations that can develop when parole and probation officers visit private homes to check on former inmates and it would seem to be a no-brainer. Everyone involved needs footage of these ultimate invasions of privacy: the warrantless search of homes under the exceptions provided by probation/parole law.
“Are you post [Peace Officer Standards and Training] certified? Are you a peace officer?” CBS Colorado Investigator Karen Morfitt asked a Colorado Department of Corrections community parole officer who asked not to be identified.
“I am,” he said.
“Do you wear a body worn camera?” Morfitt asked.
“I don’t.”
“Why is that?”
“That’s a great question.”
The man says he’s not willing to show his face on television because he’s worried about possible retaliation.
“I think that the things we go into — into these homes, probably we should have cameras on,” he said.
Well, for all these reasons and LESS, the DOC has decided none of its officers should wear body cams because… state law says they don’t have to.
“I received an email from CDOC stating that we were turning in all of our cameras,” the man said.
That email from director Andre Stancil says they are pausing the “pilot program.”
[In] the same email, detailing the end of the pilot program, the DOC director explains “this legislation does not specifically mandate the use of BWC’s for the Colorado Department of Corrections, division of adult parole.”
That’s apparently all that matters: it’s not mandatory, so it’s not going to happen, even though the DOC already has hundreds of cameras sitting on shelves and corrections officers expressing their desire to have more documentation of their interactions with inmates and parolees.
So, instead of officers perhaps being given the opportunity to deter violence against them or counter complaints made against them, the status quo remains in place. But it won’t be the correctional officers who suffer most from this non-decision. It will be the people they oversee — people who are nearly completely powerless under the law and whose abuse at the hands of the state will continue in places cameras can’t see (or hear) — areas that include their own homes.
Ohio residents pay for the cops. They pay for the cameras. Now, they’re expected to pay for the footage generated by cops and their cameras. Governor Mike DeWine, serving no one but cops and their desire for opacity, recently signed a bill into law that will make it much more expensive for residents to exercise their public records rights.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a controversial bill into law that could charge the public hundreds of dollars for footage from law enforcement agencies, including body cameras.
[…]
Around 2 a.m. during the 17-hour marathon lame duck session, lawmakers passed H.B. 315, a massive, roughly 450-page omnibus bill.
In it was a provision that could cost people money to get access to video from police and jails. Law enforcement could charge people for the “estimated cost” of processing the video — and you would have to pay before the footage is released. Governments could charge up to $75 an hour for work, with a fee cap of $750 per request.
[…]
The policy was not public, nor had a hearing, prior to being snuck into the legislation.
That’s pretty ugly. It’s also a clear indication those pushing this measure knew the public wouldn’t like it, hence the last-minute subterfuge tied to an apparently must-pass bill shoved through the legislation before its Christmas recess.
Reporter Morgan Trau had questions following the passage of this measure. Gov. DeWine had answers. But they’re completely unsatisfactory.
“These requests certainly should be honored, and we want them to be honored. We want them to be honored in a swift way that’s very, very important,” DeWine responded. “We also, though — if you have, for example, a small police department — very small police department — and they get a request like that, that could take one person a significant period of time.”
Sure, that’s part of the equation. Someone has to take time to review information requested via a public records request. But that’s part of the government’s job. It’s not an excuse to charge a premium just to fulfill the government’s obligations to the public.
DeWine had more of the same in his official statement on this line item — a statement he was presumably compelled to issue due to many people having these exact same questions about charging people a third time for something they’d already paid for twice.
No law enforcement agency should ever have to choose between diverting resources for officers on the street to move them to administrative tasks like lengthy video redaction reviews for which agencies receive no compensation–and this is especially so for when the requestor of the video is a private company seeking to make money off of these videos. The language in House Bill 315 is a workable compromise to balance the modern realities of preparing these public records and the cost it takes to prepare them.
Well, the biggest problem with this assertion is that no law enforcement agency ever has to choose between reviewing footage for release and keeping an eye on the streets. I realize some smaller agencies may not have a person dedicated to public records responses, but for the most part, I would prefer someone other than Officer Johnny Trafficstop handle public records releases. First, they’re not specifically trained to handle this job. Second, doing this makes it a fox-in-the-hen-house situation, where officers might be handling information involving themselves, which is a clear conflict of interest.
Mike Weinman with the Fraternal Order of Police said this new law would help smaller municipalities that already struggle with staffing.
“Whoever is in charge of their public records, that person might be pulled off the road to do these things,” Weinman said. “So that means there’s a person who’s not responding to calls, who’s not out there being proactive in the community.”
To be fair, this stupidity comes from a cop unionrep, but these reps are almost always current or former cops. This says the same thing: without charging $75/hour, smaller agencies might have to pull officers off patrol to process video for records requests. Equally as stupid as Gov. DeWine’s assertions and equally (and willfully) ignorant of the reality.
Again, no cop should be handling records requests because of the conflict of interest, much less the lack of specific skills. Beyond that, there’s the fact that the state could easily have increased funding for public records handling, just as easily as it decided everyone should have to pay more to exercise their First Amendment right to access information. But legislators (and the cops who back them) don’t want more accountability or transparency. They want to erect barriers that limit their exposure. So, the end result is a law that allows law enforcement agencies to “recoup” the costs of processing, even if the cost of processing is actually much lower or already covered by their existing budgets.
This argument isn’t much better:
Marion Police Chief Jay McDonald, also the president of the Ohio FOP, showed me that he receives requests from people asking for drunk and disorderly conduct videos. Oftentimes, these people monetize the records on YouTube, he added.
Moving past the conflict of interest that is a police chief also being the head of a police union, the specific problem with this argument is that it suggests it’s ok to financially punish everyone just because a small minority of requesters are abusing the system for personal financial gain. Again, while it sounds like a plausible argument for charging processing fees, the real benefit isn’t in deterring YouTube opportunists, but in placing a tax on transparency most legitimate requesters simply won’t be able to pay. And that’s the obvious goal here. If it wasn’t, this proposal would have gone up for discussion, rather than tacked onto the end of 315-page omnibus bill at the last minute. This is nothing but what it looks like: people in the legislature doing a favor for cops… and screwing over their own constituents.
It often seems that when people have no good ideas or, indeed, any ideas at all, the next thing out of their mouths is “maybe some AI?” It’s not that AI can’t be useful. It’s that so many use cases are less than ideal.
Enter Axon, formerly Taser, which has moved from selling modified cattle prods to cops to selling them body cameras. The shift makes sense. Policy makers want to believe body cameras will create more accountability in police forces that have long resisted this. Cops don’t mind this push because it’s far more likely body cam footage will deliver criminal convictions than it will force them to behave better when wielding the force of law.
Axon wants to keep cops hooked on body cams. It hands them out like desktop printers: cheap entry costs paired with far more expensive, long-term contractual obligations. Buy a body cam from Axon on the cheap and expect to pay fees for access and storage for years to come. Now, there’s another bit of digital witchery on top of the printer cartridge-esque access fees: AI assistance for police reports.
Theoretically, it’s a win. Cops will spend less time bogged down in paperwork and more time patrolling the streets. In reality, it’s something else entirely: the abdication of responsibility to algorithms and a little more space separating cops from accountability.
AI can’t be relied on to recap news items coherently. It’s already shown it’s capable of “hallucinating” narratives due to the data it relies on or has been trained on. There’s no reason to believe that, at this point, AI is capable of performing tasks cops have been doing for years: writing up arrest/interaction reports.
The problem here is that a bogus AI-generated report causes far more real-world pain than that experienced by news agencies that endure momentary public shaming or lawyers being chastised by judges. People can lose their rights and their actual freedom if AI concocts a narrative that supports the actions taken by officers. Even at its best, AI should not be allowed to determine whether or not people have access to their rights or literal freedom.
“Police reports play a crucial role in our justice system,” ACLU speech, privacy and technology senior policy analyst and report author Jay Stanley wrote. “Concerns include the unreliability and biased nature of AI, evidentiary and memory issues when officers resort to this technology, and issues around transparency.
“In the end, we do not think police departments should use this technology,” Stanley concluded.
There’s more in this article from The Register than just some summarizing of the ACLU’s comprehensive report [PDF]. It also features input from people who’ve actually done this sort of work on the ground level who align themselves with the ACLU’s criticism, rather than the government agencies they worked for. This is from Brandon Vigliarolo, who wrote this op-ed for El Reg:
In my time as a Military Policeman in the US Army, I spent plenty of time on shifts writing boring, formulaic, and necessarily granular reports on incidents, and it was easily the worst part of my job. I can definitely sympathize with police in the civilian world, who deal with far worse – and more frequent – crimes than I had to address on small bases in South Korea.
That said, I’ve also had a chance to play with modern AI and report on many of its shortcomings, and the ACLU seems to definitely be on to something in Stanley’s report. After all, if we can’t even trust AI to write something as legally low-stakes as news or a bug report, how can we trust it to do decent police work?
The answer is we can’t. We can’t do it now. And there’s a solid chance we can’t do it ever.
Both Axon and law enforcement agencies choosing to utilize this tech will claim human backstops will prevent AI from hallucinating someone into jail or manufacturing justification for civil rights violations. But that’s obviously not true. And that’s been confirmed by Axon itself, whose future business relies on future uptake of its latest tech offering.
In an ideal world, Stanley added, police would be carefully reviewing AI-generated drafts, but that very well may not be the case. The report notes that Draft One includes a feature that can intentionally insert silly sentences into AI-produced drafts as a test to ensure officers are thoroughly reviewing and revising the drafts. However, Axon’s CEO mentioned in a video about Draft One that most agencies are choosing not to enable this feature.
This leading indicator suggests cop shops are looking for a cheap way to relieve the paperwork burden on officers, presumably to free them up to do the more important work of law enforcement. The lower cost/burden seems to be the only focus, though. Even when given something as simple as a single-click option to ensure better human backstopping of AI-generated police reports, agencies are opting out because, apparently, it might mean some reports will be rejected and/or the thin veil of plausible deniability might be pierced.
That’s part of the bargain. If a robot writes a report, officers can plausibly claim discrepancies between reports and recordings aren’t their fault. But that’s not even the only problem. As the ACLU report notes, there’s a chance AI-generated reports will decided something “seen” or “heard” in recordings supports officers’ actions, even if human review of the same footage would see clear rights violations.
The other problem is inadvertent confirmation bias. In an ideal world, any arrest or interaction that has resulted in questionable force deployment — especially when cops kill someone — cops would need to give statements before they’ve had a chance to review recordings. This would help eliminate post facto narratives that remove contradictory statements and allow officers to agree upon an exonerative narrative. Allowing AI to craft reports from uploaded footage undercuts this necessary time-and-distance factor, giving cops’ cameras the chance to tell the story before the cops have even come up with their own.
Now, it might seem that would be better. But I can guarantee you that if the AI report doesn’t agree with the officer’s report in disputed situations, the AI-generated report will be kicked to the curb. And it works the other way, too.
Even the early adopters of body cams found a way to make this so-called “accountability” tech work for them. When the cameras weren’t being turned on or off to suit narrative needs, cops were attacking compliant arrestees while yelling things like “stop resisting” or claiming the suspect was trying to grab one of their weapons. The subjective angle, coupled with extremely subjective statements in the recordings, was leveraged to provide justification for any lovely of force deployed. AI is incapable of separating cop pantomime from what’s captured on tape, which means all cops have to do to talk a bot into backing their play is say a bunch of stuff that sounds like probable cause while recording an arrest or search.
We already know most law enforcement agencies rarely proactively review body cam footage. And they’re even less likely to review reports and question officers if things look a bit off. Most agencies don’t have the personnel to handle proactive reviews, even if they have the desire to engage in better oversight. And an even larger percentage lack the desire to police their police officers, which means there will never be enough people in place to check the work (and paperwork) of law enforcers.
Adding AI won’t change this equation. It will just make direct oversight that much simpler to abandon. Cops won’t be held accountable because they can always blame discrepancies on the algorithm. And the tech will encourage more rights violations because it adds another layer of deniability officers and their supervisors can deploy when making statements in state courts, federal courts, or the least-effective court of all, the court of public opinion.
These are all reasons accountability-focused legislators, activists, and citizens should oppose a shift to AI-enhanced police reports. And they’re the same reasons that will encourage rapid adoption of this tech by any law enforcement agency that can afford it.
As much as I dislike and distrust Axon (formerly Taser and the leading proponent of the “excited delirium” theory of cop exoneration), I just don’t think there’s much going on here. Sometimes there are actual monopolies. And sometimes, one business is just better at business than its competitors.
Baltimore, Maryland; Augusta, Maine; and Howell, New Jersey have sued Axon, alleging that the company has committed antitrust violations, abused its market power, and forced cities to pay exorbitant fees for a basic, but crucial piece of law enforcement tech.
Filed in federal court in New Jersey, the suit claims that the Arizona-based company formerly known as Taser International bought VieVu, one of its key competitors, to secure four major contracts that had eluded it: New York City, Oakland, Miami-Dade and Phoenix. Then, under its new Axon brand, it aggressively raised prices for clients that had few other options. Within a year, Axon’s body cam prices had risen 50 percent. By 2022, those prices had nearly tripled, reaching $490 per camera.
The lawsuit [PDF] stresses a lot of these points and says a lot of things about profit margins being inordinately high. But if that’s what the market bears, that’s what Axon can charge (is there a pun intended here? maybe?). And while it’s somewhat concerning that Axon managed to acquire VieVu (which it referred to internally as its “#2 competitor”), that alone is not enough to create a monopoly.
Also highlighted in the lawsuit are a bunch of things lots of businesses do, like tie up customers with lengthy contracts, force customers to only use refills made by the same company (Taser refills are pretty much proprietary ink cartridges), and vertically integrate as much as possible to make moving away from tied-in products extremely difficult. This is something Axon does with its body cameras and its front end for recording access, Evidence.com. Cameras without storage and access aren’t all that useful. And only Axon cameras work with Axon’s software.
Again, this is the sort of thing seen literally everywhere. While it does make customers unhappy, it works out pretty well for the companies using these tactics. That’s why so many companies do it. And that’s why some unhappy customers sue, much like these cities have.
It’s not all that remarkable that Axon increased its camera prices once it acquired VieVu. Then again, Axon has also given away cameras for free to increase market share and tie law enforcement agencies into far more lucrative data retention/access contracts.
But what’s probably most fatal to this lawsuit is the argument it makes in support of its monopoly theory:
Motorola, Panasonic, and Utility largely make up the rest of the BWC Systems market. As demonstrated by the dramatic price increases that Axon implemented after acquiring VieVu, none of these other competitors pose the same competitive constraint on Axon as did VieVu, and none were able to constrain the exercise of Axon’s monopoly power. These other competitors’ BWC Systems rarely provided significant competition to Axon in RFP processes conducted by police departments. A chart included in a December 2019 Axon investor presentation shows the meager market share these competitors had compared to Axon, with the closest competitor, Motorola, controlling only 7 of 69 U.S. Major City Chief Agencies compared to Axon’s 47.
It’s that first sentence. If you’re able to list a handful of other competitors in the market, you can’t credibly make a claim the market has been monopolized. Sure, Axon may have the largest share of the market, but it’s no more a monopoly than Google’s outsized share of the search engine market. Some companies manage to dominate markets because they’re making better products, have better marketing, or do both well enough that their name becomes synonymous for competitors‘ products — like Taser for any stun gun-esque weapon and Google becoming the go-to shorthand for performing a web search on any service.
The lawsuit also claims Axon “aggressively” defends its patents, to the point it has sued “potential competitors” in the “less lethal weapon” market out of existence. Again, while nobody likes a bully, this is sort of thing lots of patent holders do, even when they control far less market share than Axon does. Again, just because Axon is dominant doesn’t mean it’s a monopoly or that any of these claims — ones that could apply to plenty of other companies in plenty of other fields — add up to the conclusion this lawsuit wants a judge to reach.
I, for one, welcome this lawsuit, if for no other reason than it might expose some previously unknown facts about Axon, its management, its sales tactics, and its communications with law enforcement agencies. In other words, I’m here for the discovery. Axon may be a “gorilla” (as one of its execs encouraged its marketers to be) but it’s hardly a monopoly.
Taser long ago locked down the market for “less than lethal” (but still frequently lethal) weapons. It has also written itself into the annals of pseudoscience with its invocation of not-an-actual-medical condition “excited delirium” as it tried to explain away the many deaths caused by its “less than lethal” Taser.
These days Taser does business as Axon. In addition to separating itself from its troubled (and somewhat mythical) past, Axon’s focus has shifted to body cameras and data storage. The cameras are the printer and the data storage is the ink. The real money is in data management, and that appears to be where Axon is headed next. And, of course, like pretty much everyone at this point, the company believes AI can take a lot of the work out of police work. Here’s Thomas Brewster and Richard Nieva with the details for Forbes.
On Tuesday, Axon, the $22 billion police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. “If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer’s time to be back out policing,” Smith said.
If you don’t spend too much time thinking about it, it sounds like a good idea. Doing paperwork consumes a large amounts of officers’ time and a tool that automates at least part of the process would, theoretically, allow officers to spend more time doing stuff that actually matters, like trying to make a dent in violent crime — the sort of thing cops on TV are always doing but is a comparative rarity in real life.
It’s well-documented that officers spend a large part of their day performing the less-than-glamorous function of being an all-purpose response to a variety of issues entirely unrelated to the type of crimes that make headlines and fodder for tough-on-crime politicians.
On the other hand, when officers are given discretion to handle crime-fighting in a way they best see fit, they almost always do the same thing: perform a bunch of pretextual stops in hopes of lucking into something more criminal than the minor violation that triggered the stop. A 2022 study of law enforcement time use by California agencies provided these depressing results:
Overall, sheriff patrol officers spend significantly more time on officer-initiated stops – “proactive policing” in law enforcement parlance – than they do responding to community members’ calls for help, according to the report. Research has shown that the practice is a fundamentally ineffective public safety strategy, the report pointed out.
In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.
In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion.
So, the first uncomfortable question automated report writing poses is this: what are cops actually going to do with all this free time? If it’s just more of this, we really don’t need it. All AI will do is allow problematic agencies and officers to engage in more of the biased policing they already engage in. Getting more of this isn’t going to make American policing better and it’s certainly not going to address the plethora of long-standing issues American law enforcement agencies have spent decades trying to ignore.
Then there’s the AI itself. Everything at use at this point is still very much in the experimental stage. Auto-generated reports might turn into completely unusable evidence, thanks to the wholly expected failings of the underlying software.
These reports, though, are often used as evidence in criminal trials, and critics are concerned that relying on AI could put people at risk by depending on language models that are known to “hallucinate,” or make things up, as well as display racial bias, either blatantly or unconsciously.
That’s a huge problem. Also problematic is the expected workflow, which will basically allow cops to grade their own papers by letting the AI handle the basics before they step in and clean up anything that doesn’t agree with the narrative an officer is trying to push. This kind of follow-up won’t be optional, which also might mean some agencies will have to allow officers to review their own body cam footage — something they may have previously forbidden for exactly this reason.
On top of that, there’s the garbage-in, garbage-out problem. AI trained on narratives provided by officers may take it upon themselves to “correct” narratives that seem to indicate an officer may have done something wrong. It’s also going to lend itself to biased policing by tech-washing BS stops by racist cops, portraying these as essential contributions to public safety.
Of course, plenty of officers do these sorts of things already, so there’s a possibility it won’t make anything worse. But if the process Axon is pitching makes things faster, there’s no reason to believe what’s already wrong with American policing won’t get worse in future. And, as the tech improves (so to speak), the exacerbation of existing problems and the problems introduced by the addition of AI will steadily accelerate.
That’s not to say there’s no utility in processes that reduce the amount of time spent on paperwork. But it seems splitting off a clerical division might be a better solution — a part of the police force that handles the paperwork and vets camera footage, but is performed by people who are not the same ones who captured the recordings and participated in the traffic stop, investigation, or dispatch call response.
And I will say this for Axon: at least its CEO recognizes the problems this could introduce and suggests agencies limit automated report creation to things like misdemeanors and never in cases where deadly force is deployed. But, like any product, it will be the end users who decide how it’s used. And so far, the expected end users are more than willing to streamline things they view as inessential, but are far less interested in curtailing abuse by those using these systems. Waiting to see how things play out just isn’t an acceptable option — not when there are actual lives and liberties on the line.
At the center of this latest “we’re better than you” posturing by law enforcement is the raid of the wrong house by self-proclaimed “trained and experienced” officers, who mistook one Arab male for another before rushing into a house and pointing guns at everyone.
On Tuesday, the Raleigh Police Department asked a judge to block the release of body-camera footage from the botched raid of Amir and Mirian Ibrahim Abboud’s home in April 2021. On Thursday, the judge obliged.
According to court records, an RPD SWAT team “suddenly and without warning, broke and busted open the Abbouds’ front door with a battering ram, pointing their long, AR-styled firearms at Mr. Abboud, Mrs. Abboud, and their 11-month-old son.” Though the search warrant was ultimately based on mistaken identity—State Bureau of Investigation agents confused Abboud with a neighbor who is also of Arab descent—the police refused to pay for the damage, court records show.
In this case, the Raleigh PD actually went to court to argue against the release of body cam footage of this botched raid. It didn’t have to do this but it did. Worse, it got a court to agree with its arguments — arguments that were patently ridiculous.
The RPD pointed out that an attorney for the Abbouds had released home security footage of the raid online, which the police said made releasing the body camera footage redundant. At the same time, the RPD claimed that releasing the body camera footage might expose confidential information about search warrant execution or damage officers’ reputations.
It’s only in cases like these that government entities seem to feel redundancy is a bad thing. And if no harm was done to officers by the release of the home security footage, it seems no harm would occur if the PD released its own footage.
But after arguing the public had all the footage it deserved, the RPD went on to argue that the supposedly “redundant” footage would somehow “expose confidential information” or “damage officers’ reputations” if it released its own footage. Not only that, but the PD’s lawyer claimed releasing footage of a wrong house raid captured on home security cameras would somehow endanger the RPD itself.
At Tuesday’s hearing, RPD attorney Sherita Walton told Houston—who was appointed by Senate leader Phil Berger last year—that the Abboud raid was “valid on its face” and insisted that none of the officers did anything wrong. Walton said releasing the footage would be “dangerous.” (The SBI also asked Judge Houston to withhold the footage.)
All of these arguments are equally stupid. Footage can be edited to remove “confidential information” and protect the identities of the officers involved in the wrong house raid. As for “damaging reputations,” what even is the point of this argument? The involved officers did what they did and any reputational damage is due to their own actions. It has nothing to do with the residents of a house that was only raided because the cops screwed up. And there’s no “because it might make us look bad” public records exception. And if the officers “did nothing wrong,” it’s hard to believe releasing footage of such outstanding police work would be “dangerous.”
Unfortunately, as Indy Week points out, body cam footage is not considered a public record under North Carolina state law. That doesn’t mean it can never be released. It’s that the presumption of opacity prevails unless the state AG or a presiding judge determines otherwise.
According to a complaint filed on December 7 in Wake County, Raleigh police officers “wrongfully executed a ‘Quick Knock’ warrant on the Abbouds’ home”—meaning the cops knocked and kicked in the door before the Abbouds had time to answer—though they weren’t suspected of criminal activity. The police “invaded the privacy of their house with long guns drawn, terrorizing them and their child,” the complaint allege.
Knock-and-announce is already a misnomer, as it suggests officers will announce their presence and give occupants enough time to answer the door and (possibly) grant officers’ access to the house. “Quick knock” is some imagined liminal space between knock-and-announce and no-knock, where officers knock once while shouting “Police!” and immediately attempt a forcible entry.
I’m sure it works out well for North Carolina law enforcement. It means they don’t have to meet whatever standards are in place for a no-knock warrant but still get all the advantages of a no-knock, with the only separation being the fractions of a second needed to yell the word “police” once to satisfy the (lol) constraints of a “quick-knock” warrant.
Among the conclusions are: (1) there is no explicit authority for North Carolina judicial officials to issue no-knock warrants; (2) judicial officials sometimes issue such warrants anyway; (3) no-knock warrants seem to be very rare; (4) when an application for a no-knock warrant is granted, the resulting warrant does not always include an express judicial determination regarding the need for a no-knock entry or an express judicial authorization of such an entry; and (5) quick-knock entries, where officers knock and announce their presence and then immediately force entry, may be widespread.
Unsurprisingly, data on no-knock and quick-knock warrants is hard to come by. Pretty much the only option is tracking every criminal case that involves a warrant and that’s something that’s difficult to scale, not just in terms of expense (state and local courts tend to charge even more exorbitant per-page fees than even the rightfully-reviled PACER system) but in terms of practicality.
But what can be surmised from the limited data is that “quick knock” warrants are a handy replacement for no-knock warrants, giving officers the same leeway to immediately engage in a forcible entry without asking them to satisfy the minimal requirements of a no-knock warrant. They’re basically the same thing. The only difference is the “announcement” that accompanies the sound of a door being bashed in.
It’s all amazingly shitty and stupid. And now there’s this added to it: cops arguing (successfully!) that their reputations might be harmed if the public is allowed to observe their actions after the fact. And, for now, that’s how it remains. The challenges to this burial of apparently embarrassing footage will continue, but for now, cops have the upper hand. The mistakes they made will remain under the cover of judicially-granted opacity.
The Department of Justice has been keeping an eye on the Portland (OR) Police Bureau (PPB) for nearly a decade now, finding that officers routinely engage in excessive force, especially when dealing with residents suffering from mental illness. A consent decree was put in place in 2014. Since then, the Portland PD has violated the agreement regularly.
In February, the Justice Department found the Police Bureau failed to meet four key reforms under the settlement, citing inappropriate police use and management of force during protests last year, inadequate training, subpar police oversight and a failure to adequately share an annual Police Bureau report with the public as required.
U.S. Justice Department lawyers on Monday sent a letter to Portland’s city attorney and police chief recommending all uniformed patrol officers, sergeants and any officers regardless of rank who are part of tactical, traffic or crowd-control operations should wear body cameras.
The letter came as the city remains in negotiations with the police union over the parameters of equipping officers with body cameras — one of the steps the city can take to return to compliance with its 2014 settlement with the federal government over police use of excessive force.
Somehow, the police force patrolling one of the most “progressive” cities in the country was still using outdated tech to collect footage of police interactions, limited almost solely to whatever could be captured by dash cams. The DOJ also suggested the cameras be activated any time officers engaged with a member of a public, but especially in cases where guns or Tasers were drawn or car chases initiated.
Somehow, the Portland PD has still failed to start equipping its officers with body cameras. This will be changing, but apparently on the PPB’s timeline, rather than the DOJ’s. 173 officers will be part of the test run that will test camera functionality. Eventually, this will expand to 636 officers. Currently, the city employees about ~800 sworn officers.
The PPB and the public differ on how body camera footage should be handled. The PB believes it should set the rules on access to footage. Or, at least, its union feels this way.
Sgt. Aaron Schmautz, president of the Portland Police Association, argued that allowing officers to view the camera footage beforehand would allow them to consider all the evidence and write the most accurate and thorough report of what occurred.
Schmautz said most agencies of “any substantial size” in Oregon, including Oregon State Police, the Clackamas and Washington county sheriff’s offices, Eugene, Beaverton, Gresham, Hillsboro, Medford and Bend police departments, allow officers to review their camera video before writing reports.
The DOJ disagrees.
The Justice Department has recommended to the city that when a Portland police officer uses force, the officer shouldn’t review any of the recordings before first reporting and then completing all reports or interviews associated with the incident.
Officers who use deadly force or are involved in a death in custody case also shouldn’t view any of the footage until they give an interview to an investigator and only after they get permission from the local prosecutor, the federal lawyers suggested. Local prosecutors may not, for example, want an officer to view the footage before testifying before a grand jury.
The DOJ’s position may be an outlier, but it’s not as though it’s nonexistent. The DOJ noted this was the policy in place in major cities like Baltimore, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia.
More than half, or 52 percent, of 2,110 community members surveyed in Portland this year said police should not be allowed to view body camera footage that captures an officer’s use of force before writing reports or being interviewed.
And 46 percent of those surveyed said videos of police use of deadly force should be made public immediately after prosecutors determine that releasing the footage won’t jeopardize a criminal investigation.
A survey [PDF] conducted by the city with the assistance of consultants Rosenbaum & Associates queried the public on the DOJ’s body cam recommendations, as well as those crafted by the city’s civilian oversight board, the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP). Here’s the PCCEP’s recommendations:
PPB should be transparent in how officers for the pilot project are selected. Officers for the pilot project should be randomly selected. This will alleviate the perception that officers are handpicked for the project based on behavior and other positive factors that could influence results.
PPB should be transparent in how officers for the pilot project are selected. Officers for the pilot project should be randomly selected. This will alleviate the perception that officers are handpicked for the project based on behavior and other positive factors that could influence results.
We strongly recommend body camera footage be stored by an independent third party.
Officers should write their police reports before viewing body camera footage. This would avoid officers tailoring their accounts of the incident based on what the footage shows.
Strict discipline for officers who turn off their cameras when they are supposed to be engaged. This should include the possibility of termination.
Public access to the video should be accessible to all individuals in regard to disabilities, etc including ADA accessible.
These recommendations make sense. That’s why the PPB rank-and-file — as fronted by their police union — is against them. The public definitely wants more accountability. The 52% wanting cops to be locked out of footage until after reports are written and interviews completed may seem like a slim majority, but factor in the 13.5% that had no opinion and only 34% of city residents think cops should be able to craft narratives that fit the recordings when writing reports or answering questions.
Other results from the survey show an overwhelming majority of those surveyed want more accountability from police officers.
– Seventy percent said the city auditor’s office should be able to view the body camera recordings to evaluate the Police Bureau’s performance.
– Ninety percent said the Police Bureau’s training division should be allowed to view body camera recordings to help develop or alter officer training.
– Eighty-five percent said an officer’s supervisor should be allowed to randomly review body camera recordings to see if an officer is doing their job appropriately.
I’m sure the PPB knows the public wants more accountability from officers. But it’s probably going to side with what its officers want, which is more of the opacity that has encouraged a culture of violence and misconduct. But the DOJ agreement complicates matters, and that means the PPB will at least have to try to meet the public halfway, which should hopefully make the city’s cops better by making the worst of the rank-and-file feel the heat.
