The New Haven Police Department is getting ready to launch a pilot program using artificial intelligence.
Christian Bruckhart, the public information officer for New Haven’s police department, said they are looking at using the software Draft One, by the police tech company Axon, to save time in writing police reports and get officers back on the streets quicker.
“If we can use artificial technology to make ourselves more efficient and write those reports and condense the amount it takes to write those reports, we can have more time spent out on the street, rather than typing,” Bruckhart said.
He said incident reports can sometimes take hours to complete and this is a way to use technology to improve overall efficiency.
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The police reports would be generated using the audio from officers' body cameras and would then be reviewed by the officer that initially responded to the incident, according to Bruckhart.
Bruckhart added the AI software would not be used for homicides or shootings, but rather for low level offenses such as larceny and theft.
The pilot program is expected to begin in February and run from three to six months followed by a program review.
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“Its an experiment to see how well it works and if we can make our officers more efficient,” Bruckhart said.
People in New Haven had mixed reactions regarding the pilot program.
“Sometimes AI can pick up different words when other words are used but besides that, I think it's a good idea,” resident Anttwon Brown said.
A New Haven native shared some distrust towards the proposal.
“I don't think a computer writing up peoples' history or their incidents can do a better job than a human.”
Meanwhile, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Computer Data at the University of New Haven Vahid Behzadan pointed out some things to keep in mind when using Draft One in this capacity.
“Officers may become trusting and overly reliant on this technology and they miss out on small factual errors, mistakes in their reporting. Two, it's only relying on audio transcriptions that may be missing out on other modalities of information such as visual information, or the context of the interaction," Behzadan said.
Behzadan said it is good that the police department is starting the efforts as a pilot program that will then be reviewed, in order to weigh its success.
“Pilot programs should go hand-in-hand with accurate and well designed measurements, benchmarking, techniques, making sure there are quantitative measures of how well the system is doing and documenting rare instances of errors that they make, is going to be very useful not just for the local police department but maybe others considering on implementing this technology,” Behzadan said.
The American Civil Liberties Union provided the following statement on the matter:
"The New Haven Police Department’s proposal to use AI software for drafting police reports raises significant concerns. Introducing nonhuman intelligence into this process—particularly software programmed by humans with potentially biased data—could have profound consequences on individuals’ lives and their interactions with the criminal legal system.
This decision also raises issues of transparency and accountability. The public deserves to know how this technology works, how data is stored and used, and whether it could be sold. There must also be clear insight into how AI-generated reports might influence or amplify biases within the machine learning models. Decisions like this demand public input and principled, careful consideration, and safeguards before moving forward."
