AI Police Reports: Year in Review

(eff.org)

65 points | by hn_acker 3 days ago

5 comments

  • futuraperdita 16 minutes ago
    What worries me is that _a lot of people seem to see LLMs as smarter than themselves_ and anthropmorphize them into a sort of human-exact intelligence. The worst-case scenario of Utah's law is that when the disclaimer is added that the report is generated by AI, enough jurists begin to associate that with "likely more correct than not".
  • wyldfire 1 hour ago
    > important first step in reigning in AI police reports.

    That should be 'reining in'. "Reign" is -- ironically - - what monarchs do.

    • DetectDefect 1 hour ago
      Such innocent mistakes make me smile these days because it gives assurance a real human wrote them.
      • lithocarpus 21 minutes ago
        Don't worry sufficiently advanced LLMs will learn how to put in the right amount of typoes to be convincing.
        • bgbntty2 4 minutes ago
          It's not certain that LLMs don't do this already—it's likely their doing this even now.
      • cyberax 20 minutes ago
        Unless it's an LLM instructed to make occasional mistakes.
  • avidiax 1 hour ago
    This does sound problematic, but if a police officer's report contradicts the body-worn camera or other evidence, it already undermines their credibility, whether they blame AI or not. My impression is that police don't usually face repercussions for inaccuracies or outright lying in court.

    > That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report

    The bigger issue, that the article doesn't cover, is that police officers may not carefully review the AI generated report, and then when appearing in court months or years later, will testify to whatever is in the report, accurate or not. So the issue is that the officer doesn't contradict inaccuracies in the report.

    • parineum 36 minutes ago
      > My impression is that police don't usually face repercussions for inaccuracies or outright lying in court.

      That's because it's a very difficult thing to prove. Bad memories and even completely false memories are real things.

      • BrenBarn 13 minutes ago
        That's why we need a greatly reduced standard of proof for officer misconduct, especially when it comes to consequences like just losing your job (as opposed to, e.g., jail time).
  • intended 9 minutes ago
    > In July of this year, EFF published a two-part report on how Axon designed Draft One to defy transparency. Police upload their body-worn camera’s audio into the system, the system generates a report that the officer is expected to edit, and then the officer exports the report. But when they do that, Draft One erases the initial draft, and with it any evidence of what portions of the report were written by AI and what portions were written by an officer. That means that if an officer is caught lying on the stand – as shown by a contradiction between their courtroom testimony and their earlier police report – they could point to the contradictory parts of their report and say, “the AI wrote that.” Draft One is designed to make it hard to disprove that.

    > 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.

    Policing and Hallucinations. Can’t wait to see this replicated globally.

  • throw-12-16 1 hour ago
    “Fighting back” = adding a disclaimer.

    You guys are so fucked.

    • hackyhacky 1 hour ago
      > You guys are so fucked.

      "You guys"? Everyone is fucked. This is going to be everywhere. Coming to your neighborhood, eventually.

      • Zaphoos 33 minutes ago
        Not everyone lives in a 3rd world authoritarian backwater, its time to stop that ridiculous US-centrism
      • throw-12-16 51 minutes ago
        I dont live in a police state.
        • fouc 32 minutes ago
          I guess that means you don't live in the US, or in the UK, or in Australia.
        • parineum 34 minutes ago
          You either don't have police reports or some amount of your country's police reports aee written by AI.

          I'd be more worried that you aren't reading articles about it than if you were.

          • throw-12-16 18 minutes ago
            Considering that AI can barely write in my native language I am not worried.

            There are countries on this planet that are not actively digging their own graves.