The first draft of a police report can now be written by artificial intelligence.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Technology has been transformative for how police officers do their jobs.

Think body cameras, speed detection technology, surveillance drones.

And now law enforcement departments are trying to figure out if and how they want to add artificial intelligence to the mix.

Greg Barber is a science and technology journalist who recently wrote about this for the online

publication proof news. He explained how AI is being used in police work now.

Think about things like a lot of analytics, so like you need to go through a whole bunch of

surveillance footage or a lot of documents or you need assistance with writing.

And so in the case of police officers, this is writing a lot of reports. And that's something

that police officers tend to report as being a bit of a pain point in their job, something

that takes up a lot of hours. So a lot of these sort of initial products are geared towards

reducing the amount of time spent on these kind of tasks that a lot of

police officers hold up as being sort of annoying.

Yeah, tell me more about the use of AI in writing reports specifically, which I understand is a huge

burden. Tell me how that's meant to work.

Yeah, so the primary product that's really kind of AI-focused is a

product called Draft 1, which is made by a police technology company called Axon. They're really

the kind of dominant provider of police technology, including things like body-worn cameras.

But their first kind of major AI product was draft one, which the idea is to take

some of the audio from a police incident or an interaction with the community and summarize that

into the form of a police report. So does it save police officers time using AI to write the reports?

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