In Denver, AI drones read license plates from the sky. Dallas police use AI facial recognition software to help identify suspects in violent crimes. Police in Los Angeles and New York have used AI-powered algorithms to predict where crime might occur.

Police departments across the country are turning to artificial intelligence to supercharge law enforcement efforts, a strategy that Honolulu is moving one step closer to on Monday when the police department will begin testing an AI-assisted report writing tool.

The program, Draft One, is run by Axon, the company HPD contracts with for its body cameras. During the 30-day test, an auto-transcription feature will be activated on officers’ body cameras, but officers will not be able to get into the Draft One program, according to an internal notice issued Friday and obtained by Civil Beat.

“The test is to evaluate the accuracy and potential time savings an AI assisted report writing system such as Draft One may be capable of,” the notice reads.

The test comes one month after Honolulu Police Department Interim Chief Rade Vanic mentioned at a police commission meeting that the department was looking at using AI to assist with report writing, sparking concern among community members and union officials.

Vanic said at the meeting that he plans to get public input before officially rolling out a program.

But now that a product is being tested, advocates fear the lack of state laws and policies in place could leave the use of AI by police unchecked.

“Today it’s transcription, tomorrow it’s tracking,” said Liam Chinn, coordinator of the Reimagining Public Safety in Hawaiʻi Coalition, a collection of more than two dozen advocacy and civic groups working on criminal justice and policing reform. “That’s not accountability, that’s surveillance creep.” 

Other states are starting to regulate the use of artificial intelligence by law enforcement. Lawmakers in California, where dozens of departments and the state highway patrol use AI to some degree, passed a law last month requiring departments to disclose whenever the technology is used to help draft a police report.

But Hawaiʻi Rep. David Tarnas, who is chair of the Judiciary Committee, said he is not considering any bills related to law enforcement’s use of AI this upcoming session. Adrian Dhakhwa, chair of the Law Enforcement Standards Board, said an AI policy is worth looking into but isn’t currently a priority for the board.

AI already powers many tools officers likely come into contact with every day, such as Gemini, which provides AI overviews at the top of simple Google searches.

The state Department of Law Enforcement also uses Cloudwick, an AI-powered program from Amazon Web Services that can help analyze large amounts of data and documents in investigations.

Lt. Joseph O’Neal, who works in the Honolulu Police Department’s information technology division, said he understands many people in the community worry when they hear the word “AI,” but said it’s not going to replace officer involvement in writing reports.

“I think sometimes people get the wrong idea that AI is writing the report for you,” he said. “It’s actually dictating the body cam recording, and it’s summarizing the portion of the report that’s like a narrative.”

In Use Around The Country

The use of AI by police departments around the country is already pervasive, though no other departments in Hawaiʻi say they’re using AI.

Tyron Pope, an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said it’s impossible to know exactly how many departments use the technology, but he estimates about half of the country’s 50 major departments use AI programs for policing. 

Despite its growing popularity as a law enforcement tool, few states have laws regulating how police use it, Pope said.

Any rollout of an AI program will need to be done transparently and with input from the public, said Christopher Magnus, the newest member of the Honolulu Police Commission who served as chief in three cities before moving to Hawaiʻi.

“It’s inevitable that it’s going to become part of policing,” he said. “That said, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take the time and do the work to understand the implications of that.”

Draft One is one of the most popular AI-assisted report writing tools, but it has gotten mixed reviews.

In Chula Vista, California, the police department rolled out Draft One to its officers last week after the city approved a $1million four-year contract with Axon in September.

Sgt. Pricilla Graton said she’s so far heard positive feedback from officers, who say it saves them time. They also liked a feature that allowed them to search a transcript of their body camera footage to take them to a particular point in the video.

“The time not spent sitting in that position or standing in that position writing the report, staring at the blue light and being able to get back there in the field and back to patrol,” she said, “is just something we can’t compare to any other program at this point.”

But the Anchorage Police Department in Alaska last year decided not to move forward with the program after testing it for three months.

The department’s Deputy Chief of Administration Gina Burington told Anchorage’s Public Health and Safety Committee last year that officers still had to go back through their reports, add information, take things out and ensure accuracy. Because the software only transcribes audio and uses that to generate a summary, officers had to add information themselves about what they saw.

“We were hoping that it would be providing significant time savings for our officers, but we did not find that to be the case,” she said.

How AI-assisted police reports could influence the criminal justice system also remains to be seen.

In King County, Washington, prosecutors issued a memo last year saying they would reject police reports written using AI due to potential errors.

But O’Neal said programs like Draft One work on a closed system and only use information gathered via a body camera’s video. It is not open to the internet like other AI systems, such as ChatGPT, reducing the risk of mistakes commonly called “hallucinations.”

‘Fancy Dictation’

O’Neal described the program under consideration in Honolulu as “just fancy dictation.”

“It doesn’t use any kind of visual technology to fill gaps in observations,” he said.

But unlike a traditional transcription program, it would also use the information to create a narrative summary for the report.

The idea is that it will help save officers time on report writing and get them back into the field faster, he said, but that’s all part of the information technology division’s testing process.

O’Neal said the department is exploring multiple vendors but declined to name them.

Besides Axon, another popular company called Truleo is already being used by more than 1,000 departments nationwide, according to its website.

Monthly prices for the program range from $50 to $70 per officer, O’Neal said.

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi and City Council member Andria Tupola say they support the move as a way to increase officer efficiency.

“We’re short officers,” Tupola said. “That means that we need expedition and efficiency in how officers are using their time with less officers on the road.” 

But Chinn of the Reimagining Public Safety Coalition said there are other ways to improve officer efficiency and save them time, such as cutting down on the number of homelessness-related calls police respond to that could be better served by a social worker. 

“The vast majority of police time is spent on traffic control and answering low-level calls, noise complaint, loose dog, houseless person sleeping in a doorway, these types of things that, quite frankly, don’t require a gun and a badge,” he said. 

Concerns For Use

Police union representatives and community advocates worry that introducing AI into policing could have serious consequences for the public and officers themselves.

Nicholas Schlapak, president of the state police union, said he’s concerned AI programs could be used to monitor officers and predict their behavior.

“We have a responsibility to ensure that technology is not used to invade our members’ privacy, change our job function, retaliate against our members or be used in a way that compromises our safety or even public safety,” he said.

While some officers are curious about how it might help them with their workload, Schlapak said he doesn’t feel union members have been informed enough about it would work and what the potential downfalls might be.

While AI-assisted report writing programs so far haven’t led to any major lawsuits, other AI technologies, like facial recognition, have been far more controversial.

Earlier this year, a federal judge in Illinois approved an over $50 million settlement against facial recognition software company Clearview AI over privacy concerns. Clearview AI has been used by police departments across the country, including in Miami and Dallas. 

The Detroit Police Department changed its policies last year after three people were arrested because of bad facial recognition matches, prompting lawsuits from the ACLU.

O’Neal said HPD is not considering using facial recognition.

Mike Lambert, director of the state’s Department of Law Enforcement, said he believes facial recognition technology can be effective but has so far not considered using it because of its controversial nature. It’s something he wants to explore, though, with public input.

For Chinn, when police reform advocates started pushing for body cameras about 10 years ago, what they wanted was more police accountability, not a future in which monitoring and surveillance of the public would become constant and easy. He worries that an AI-assisted report writing program could be a gateway to other technologies.

Pope said AI is just a tool and whether or not it benefits a community depends on how it’s used.

“Technology and policing can either deepen old inequities or help dismantle them,” he said. “What makes the difference is transparency, is community oversight, is human judgment and the focus on justice and not just efficiency.”