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AI Police Reports: Year in Review
- wyldfire 10mo ago> important first step in reigning in AI police reports. That should be 'reining in'. "Reign" is -- ironically - - what monarchs do.
- DetectDefect 10mo agoSuch innocent mistakes make me smile these days because it gives assurance a real human wrote them.
- lithocarpus 10mo agoDon't worry sufficiently advanced LLMs will learn how to put in the right amount of typoes to be convincing.
- bgbntty2 10mo agoIt's not certain that LLMs don't do this already—it's likely their doing this even now.
- jondwillis 10mo agoThat’s —— not just —— possible— it’s —— ——— probable!!!
- techdmn 10mo agoI read this phrase in a Spiderman comic, probably 1990 +/- 5 years. If memory serves Harry Osborne said it to Peter Parker, something regarding Norman Osborne's activity as the Green Goblin. Anyway, it's one of those phases that immediately etched itself into my brain and replays itself whenever the situation seems appropriate. I've always wondered if the quote had a more respectable original source, but haven't been able to find one.
- fortran77 10mo agoAre you an LLM that misspelled “they’re” intentionally?
- bgbntty2 10mo agoThat was the joke. Also the use of the "It's not; it's" structure and the em-dash.
- BoxOfRain 10mo agoSwearing is a good heuristic still I think. The American corporate world remains rather prissy about swearing, so if the post sounds like a hairy docker after 12 pints then it's probably not an LLM.
- antonvs 10mo ago*typos Oh you got me
- cyberax 10mo agoUnless it's an LLM instructed to make occasional mistakes.
- throw-12-16 10mo ago[flagged]
- hackyhacky 10mo ago> You guys are so fucked. "You guys"? Everyone is fucked. This is going to be everywhere. Coming to your neighborhood, eventually.
- throw-12-16 10mo agoI dont live in a police state.
- parineum 10mo agoYou 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 10mo agoConsidering 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.
- jondwillis 10mo agoCmon tell us, Mr. Rammstein’s throwaway, which much-superior country is it?!
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoHe wont tell you. If he did he would have to admit he lives in a police state or martial law.
- avidiax 10mo agoThis 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 10mo 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 10mo agoThat'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).
- lostnground 10mo agoWhile I agree that officers should be accountable. More enforcement of them will not suddenly make them good officers. Other nations train their police for years prior to putting them into the thick of it. US police spend far less time studying, and it shows, in everything from de-escalation tactics to general legal understanding. If you create a pipeline to weed out bad officers, then there needs to be a pipeline producing better officers
- awesome_dude 10mo ago
- futuraperdita 10mo agoWhat 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".
- intended 10mo agoReading how AI is being approached in China, the focus is more on achieving day to day utilty, without eviscerating youth employment. In contrast, the SV focus of AI has been about skynet / singularity, with a hype cycle to match. This is supported by the lack of clarity on actual benefits, or clear data on GenAI use. Mostly I see it as great for prototyping - going from 0 to 1, and for use cases where the operator is highly trained and capable of verifying output. Outside of that, you seem to be in the land of voodoo, where you are dealing with something that eerily mimics human speech, but you don't have any reliable way of finding out its just BS-ing you.
- simonjgreen 10mo agoDo you have any links you could share to content you found especially insightful about AI use in China?
- intended 10mo agoI’ve been hunting for a link I found here on HN, which discussed how policy /government elites in China looked at AI. Sadly, the search for that link continues. I did find these from SCMP and Foreign Policy, but there are better articles out there. - https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-youth-unemployment/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/11/20/china-ai-race-jobs-yout... - https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports/topics/wealth-alternative-investments/article/3332729/china-bets-real-world-ai-uses-backed-state-support-and-innovation https://www.scmp.com/specialist-publications/special-reports...
- logicprog 10mo ago
- intended 10mo 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.
- taneq 10mo agoDoes the officer not take full ownership of the report once they edit it? If they got an intern to write a report and then they signed off on it, they’d be responsible, right?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- benatkin 10mo agoThe experiments of AI agents sending emails to grown-ups are good I think – AIs are doing much more dangerous stuff like these AI Police Reports. I don't think making a fuss over every agent-sent email is going to cause other AI incursion into our society to slow down. The Police Report writer is a non-human partially autonomous participant like a K9 officer. It's wishful thinking that AIs aren't going to be set loose doing jobs. The cat is out of the bag.
- dannersy 10mo agoI'm curious about this claim. What about agents sending emails to each other is good?
- benatkin 10mo agoTuring test type stuff. Having agents try to participate in the overall social community, by sending a cold email. The reason I think it's good is because with how AI is increasingly used a lot of different sorts of research is needed. A citizen could have their police report written by an AI without them opting in, just like Rob Pike could get a cold email.
- dannersy 10mo agoYou think predictive models are good for where objectivity is consequential? Like it would be in a police report?
- Manheim 10mo agoI find this article strange in its logic. If the use of AI generated content is problematic as a principle I can understand the conflict. Then no AI should be used to "transcribe and interpret a video" at all - period. But if the concern is accuracy in the AI "transcript" and not the support from AI as such, isn't it a good thing that the AI generated text is deleted after the officer has processed the text and finalized their report? That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras? Personally I do not think it is a good idea to use AI to write full police reports based on body camera recordings. However, as a support in the same way the video recordings are available, why not? If, in the future, AI will write accurate "body cam" based reports I would not have any problems with it as long as the video is still available to be checked. A full report should, in my opinion, always contain additional contextual info from the police involved and witnesses to add what the camera recordings not necessarily reflect or contain.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoMy worry is at scale AI from one vendor can introduce biases. We wont know what those biases are. But whatever they are the same bias affects all reports.
- Manheim 10mo agoThat is something to worry about, agreed. So, the quality and the reliance of AI is what we should focus on. In addition we should be able to keep track (and records of) how AI has used and build its narrative and conclutions.
- Hikikomori 10mo ago>That said, I believe it is important to aknowlegde the fact that human memory, experience and interpretation of "what really happened" is flawed, isn't that why the body cameras are in use in the first place? If everyone believed police officers already where able to recall the absolute thruth of everything that happens in situations, why bother with the cameras? Police tend to not tell the truth, on purpose.
- 0x_rs 10mo agoI recommend taking a look at this video to get an idea behind the through process (or lack thereof) law enforcement might display when provided with a number of "AI" tools, and even if this one example is closer to traditional face recognition than LLMs, the behavior seems the same. Spoiler: complete submission and deference, and in this specific case to a system that was not even their own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9M4F_U1eEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9M4F_U1eEw
- m3047 10mo agoI can read that "submission and deference" at the casino as conflict avoidance, the arresting officer says to his peers at the station that he "kind of believes" the suspect. He also states at some point that he can't cite (and I infer then release) the suspect because he is not certain who he is, and therefore has to arrest him as a "John Doe" so that his identity can be established. The fact (?) that the suspect now has a police record for this possible farce won't be settled until after the facts are determined in a court of law. This video demonstrates that when it comes down to it the blunt end of law enforcement is oftentimes a shit show of "seems to work for me" and that goes for facial recognition, shot spotter, contraband dogs, drug & DNA tests, you name it.
- eterevsky 10mo agoI think whether any text is written with the help of AI is not the main issue. The real issue is that for texts like police reports a human still has to take full responsibility for its contents. If we preserve this understanding, than the question of which texts are generated by AI becomes moot.
- moffkalast 10mo agoI agree. A programmer has to take responsibility for the generated code they push, and so do police officers for the reports they file. Using a keyboard does not absolve you of typos, it's your responsibility to proofread and correct, this is no different, just a lot more advanced. Of course the problem is also that police often operates without any real oversight and covers up more misconduct than workers in an under-rug sweeping factory. But that's another issue.
- jMyles 10mo ago> But that's another issue. ...is it? It seems to me that the growth of professional police as an institution which bears increased responsibility for public safety, along with an ever-growing set of tools that can be used to defer responsibility (see: it's not murder if it's done with a stun gun, regardless of how predictable these deaths are), are actually precisely the same issue. Let's stop allowing the state to hide behind tooling, and all be approximately equally responsible for public safety.
- riedel 10mo agoYes. Allowing officers to blame AI creates a major accountability gap. Per e.g. the EU AI Act’s logic, if a human "edits" a draft, they must be held responsible and do not need to disclose the use of AI. To ensure safety, those offerings must use premarket red teaming to eliminate biases in summarization. However, ethical safety also requires post-market monitoring, which is impossible if logs aren't preserved. Rather than focusing on individual cases, I think, we must demand systemic oversight in general and access for independent research (not only focussing on a specific technology)
- d1sxeyes 10mo ago> 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.” Normally, if a witness (e.g. a police officer) were found to be recounting something written by a third party, it would be considered hearsay and struck from the record (on objection). It would be an interesting legal experiment to have an officer using this system swear to which portions they wrote themselves, and attempt to have all the rest of the testimony disallowed as hearsay.
- zmgsabst 10mo agoI’d suspect the other direction: Police unions get LLMs classified as some kind of cognitive aid, so it becomes discrimination to ban them in school or the workplace.
- hopelite 10mo agoThat is an aspect I had not considered in my assumptions that AI/robots will eventually go through the same/similar social justice process as all the other causes, i.e., women’s suffrage, racial equality, gay rights, etc. because it will ultimately and, arguably, more than all the other prior social justice causes célèbres, serve the ruling class that has risen to dominate through social justice causes far more than anything prior. It’s going to be interesting to see the state propaganda against the bigots and evil bioists (or whatever the word smithing apparatchiks will devise) so want to bar the full equality in society of AI/robots who look just like you and me after all and also just want equal rights to love each other, and who are you to oppose others since we are all just individuals? Shoot the messenger all you want, but it’s coming.
- inavida 10mo agoCynical and fun to read but no. Too many parasites have already chewed their way to the empty heart of power of the post-war liberal system, and I think the next time it gets power at the highest levels in the US will be the end if it there. Maybe it will last another generation in Europe, but not long enough to see the scenario you describe play out.
- bushbaba 10mo agoTo me it’s a question of it they are on average better. It’s not like human based input is perfect either.
- sejje 10mo agoDo mistakes by the LLM carry the same weight as mistakes by the officer? Can the case be thrown out for an LLM mistake? Does the officer face repercussions for introducing false information via this tool?
- maximgeorge 10mo ago[dead]
- idopmstuff 10mo ago> 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." This seems solvable by passing a law that makes the officer legally responsible for the report as if he had written it. He doesn't get to use this excuse in the courtroom and it gets stricken from the record if he tries. That honestly seems like a better solution than storing the original AI-generated version, because that can reinforce the view that AI wrote it to jurors, even if the officer reviewed it and decided it was correct at the time.
- jfreds 10mo agoYeah this seems like an obvious solution, which axon ought to be on board with since it protects them. When juniors use the excuse “oh Claude wrote that” in a PR, I tell them if the PR has their name on it, they wrote it - and their PRs are part of their performance review. This is no different
- m3047 10mo agoUpvoted because I think it's an important topic, but this take causes me to question the motive for the article... which ironically is my big concern with using LLMs to write stuff generally (the unconscious censoring / proctoring of voice and viewpoint): 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.” IANAL but if they signed off on it then presumably they own it. Same as if it was Microsoft Dog, an intern, whatever. If they said "the AI shat it" then I'd ask "what parts did you find unacceptable and edit?" and then expect we'd get the juicy stuff hallucinations or "I don't recall". Did they write this, or are they testifying to the veracity of hearsay? From what I've seen reports written by / for lawyers / jurists / judges already "pull" to a voice and viewpoint; I'll leave it there.
- lubujackson 10mo agoThe solution is to remove the temptation to hit a "looks good" button. A non-shitty AI tool could return a bullet list of events and time stamps: - officer said "Freeze!" at 3:12:34am - "my arm!" said person #2 at 3:12:48am Then the office must at a minimum reformat the events into text and add their own details. Again, AI is a tool and it is immensely useful if we treat it like a tool and not a panacea.
- Rosleyrodrigues 10mo ago[dead]
- Rosleyrodrigues 10mo ago[dead]