Arizona sheriff’s office turns to AI to speed up paperwork

TUCSON, Ariz. – As artificial intelligence becomes more mainstream, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department is looking at how it can use the emerging technology.

At the beginning of the year, deputies began a trial of Axon’s Draft One, which is a program that writes incident reports using AI. A body camera records the interactions, then the program uses the audio plus any additional information from the deputy to create a first draft. Deputies then review everything before submitting the final report.

“They’re able to verify the completeness, the accuracy and all of that,” Capt. Derek Ogden said, “But the initial first draft, they can’t submit as their case report.”

Demonstrating the program, Deputy Dylan Lane showed how Draft One can write a case report that would have taken him 30 minutes to complete in five minutes.

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“Most of that time is just the quick changes, making sure that all the information is still accurate and then just adding in those little details,” Lane said.

Ogden said Draft One saves crucial time during shifts when deputies are handling multiple incidents back-to-back. He said the program is one of several ways the department is exploring AI tools.

“Recently, we saw a detective from our criminal investigative division use AI to identify a deceased unidentified person,” Ogden said. “We’re also looking for ways to increase the productivity and efficiency of our patrol deputies and some of our corrections officers.”

Law enforcement agencies across the country are evaluating how artificial intelligence could help their departments, especially when dealing with resource shortages.

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“A lot of policing agencies are budget constrained. It is very attractive to them to have a tool that could allow them to do more with less,” said Max Isaacs from The Policing Project, which is a non-profit within NYU School of Law that studies public safety and police accountability. 

Isaacs said while AI offers opportunities to save resources, there’s not much data on how much help these programs truly provide.

“You have a lot of examples of crimes being solved or efficiencies being realized,” Isaacs said, “But in terms of large-scale studies that rigorously show us the amount of benefit, we don’t have those yet.”

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 Isaacs also raised the issue of accuracy. 

“AI is not perfect. It can rely on data that is flawed. The system itself could be flawed. When you have errors in AI systems, that can lead to some pretty serious consequences. It can lead to false arrests. It could lead to investigators going down a dead end and wasting time and resources,” Isaacs said.

Addressing those concerns, Ogden agreed that information can be flawed. He said it’s why human eyes must review every report written with Draft One.

After a successful trial with 20 deputies, Ogden said the next step is to expand Draft One to corrections officers.