SIMPLIFY
Report Writing

No, Axon takes an “officer-in-the-loop” approach to AI, which means officers remain in control of any decisions made and actions taken. Draft One generates report narratives based on body-worn camera audio, but these narratives cannot be submitted without officer review and approval. Officers must review the draft, manually fill in missing information and then sign off on the narrative’s accuracy before submission. This workflow saves officers significant time while still ensuring that each report is reviewed for accuracy and key contextual information.

No, report narratives are drafted from the audio transcript from the body-worn camera recording. The underlying model we used for Draft One transcription is Open AI’s GPT-4 Turbo and we calibrated the model to prevent speculation or embellishments that can be more common and necessary for other AI use cases. Draft One reports stick to the facts, and require officers to review and add any missing pieces of information.

It’s critical that Draft One helps provide initial report narratives that are high quality, concise and clear. The AI generated report uses good grammar and spelling, and since it is drafted from the body-worn video, it does not forget details. While AI technology can be helpful in taking on complex and time-consuming tasks, we recognize it isn’t infallible, so we developed Draft One with a range of critical safeguards, and require every report to be reviewed to preserve the crucial role of human decision-making. We ran a study to compare the quality between officer-only reports and reports created by an officer using Draft One. The study was conducted by 24 independent experts, including district attorneys, field operations command staff and inclusion scholars. Results showed that Draft One reports are equal to officer-only reports in terms of comprehensiveness, neutrality and objectivity, and Draft One reports were rated more highly when it came to terminology and coherence. In short, Draft One reports can help agencies improve the quality and consistency of their reports. Review the full study here.

Axon follows our Responsible Innovation framework whenever we develop new technology. We recognise the immense promise of ethical AI innovation. Our mission is to harness cutting-edge AI technology to revolutionise community safety, all the while prioritising the rigorous mitigation of biases and other potential risks. We build our AI-enabled technology with controls so that it never removes human decision-making in critical moments. Axon also rigorously tests our AI-enabled products to reduce inherent bias in the models before products are released. We are continually monitoring and improving any unforeseen instances of bias that may arise in the models and continue to seek external feedback from our Ethics and Equity Advisory Council and others when implementing AI.

Draft One reduces the amount of time police need to spend writing reports, which allows them to spend more time in the community or responding to calls for service. Because the reports are drafted from the body-worn camera audio, many officers have shared they speak in a more thorough, interactive and comprehensive way that benefits the report and the community members involved. Lastly, the improved report quality will help accelerate the justice process.

All Draft One data, including body-worn camera transcripts and report drafts, is securely stored and managed within the Axon Network.

While it’s true that every jurisdiction needs to define their own policies when it comes to the use of any public safety technology, there is some related legal precedent here. Today, many officers call into phone lines to complete reports, then sign off on the accuracy of those reports before submitting. Draft One is simply the next step in the evolution of accelerating report writing to give officers more time back to serve their communities. We’ve met with a number of attorneys and their feedback has helped guide our safeguards and ensure the final report is both accurate and high quality. We recommend you check out our Draft One webinar for prosecutors to learn how Draft One can impact the criminal justice process, and of course we recommend you communicate with your local attorneys to discuss Draft One. We have found that transparency with attorneys and other key stakeholders is key to successful deployments of Draft One, and even provide default footer message templates to make this easy.