3 ms·

I feel qualified to comment on this as I've read and dissected thousands of police reports. 1) Most police reports are never read after they are written. Liter

I feel qualified to comment on this as I've read and dissected thousands of police reports. 1) Most police reports are never read after they are written. Literally by nobody. Not the cop, not their superior, not the prosecutor, not the defense, not the court. Most criminal cases end in plea deals and the police reports will never be pulled or looked at. Most charges are filed by an on-duty low-level prosecutor who fields phone calls all day from officers who re-iterate the facts of the crime and ask for the statutes that have been violated. 2) Police have to testify at a trial, usually from memory. This often happens one, two, three years or more after they wrote the report. They are usually handed their old report outside the courtroom before they go in to refresh their memory. This is problematic as they will naturally conform their sworn testimony to whatever is written on the report. 3) Police reports right now are VERY badly written. They are impossibly short, impossibly vague and ridiculously low on detail. If you go back to some code you wrote last year and wonder what the hell it does because you didn't comment any of it, it's a bit like that. 4) Police reports are usually horseshit, for various reasons. They tell one side of a story. The suspect will have another view. The truth generally lies somewhere in the middle. 5) I think this might help, because the AI is naturally more neutral than an officer who's whole job is to apprehend criminals and their natural tendency is to make themselves look good and just and right and the suspect look like a really horrible human being. 6) The problem is that the AI might mishear, misunderstand or just plain hallucinate. At first the officers will re-read it, but after a few of these they will get lazy and just click OK on every report. I've been using AI to generate Alt Text for images and I've been getting lazy at checking it. Just yesterday it told me this cup[0] said "COFFEE" on it, which is a good guess, but it actually says OCEAN FEELS. It guessed, and it was 100% sure it was right. Just my two centimes. [0] https://imgur.com/a/9UEtzAD https://imgur.com/a/9UEtzAD

Terr_ 2y ago
Another problem: "The police officer generated a vague half-assed report with no good explanation for what they did" can itself be evidence in a trial. So running that through an LLM--or even delegating it to a human assistant--is kind of like tampering. It can easily generates falsehoods for a jury, like "this officer has clear recall of events" or "the officer is diligent in fact-checking" or "the officer had a proper reason for what they did". Sure, an author could try to get the same result on their own, but at least it's the same brain and not ghostwritten by someone who wasn't there, and they can't just shift the blame for contradictions onto The Magic Mystery Machine.

Terr_ 2y ago

Another problem: "The police officer generated a vague half-assed report with no good explanation for what they did" can itself be evidence in a trial. So running that through an LLM--or even delegating it to a human assistant--is kind of like tampering. It can easily generates falsehoods for a jury, like "this officer has clear recall of events" or "the officer is diligent in fact-checking" or "the officer had a proper reason for what they did". Sure, an author could try to get the same result on their own, but at least it's the same brain and not ghostwritten by someone who wasn't there, and they can't just shift the blame for contradictions onto The Magic Mystery Machine.