Last year, MIT dropout George Cheng began emailing police departments across the country with a sales pitch. His startup had developed new AI software that promised to save officers thousands of hours of paperwork every year. If they would upload their body camera footage into his program, it could generate draft police reports in minutes.
In the small Franklin County town of Wilton, Police Chief Ethan Kyes was one of the first to take him up on the offer.
Now used by about half of Wilton’s officers as part of a pilot, Kyes said the system has helped the understaffed department catch up on its heavy case load. But researchers, civil rights groups and prosecutors, including the district attorney covering Franklin County, have raised concerns about the technology’s accuracy.
Cheng’s company, Code Four, is not the first to offer AI that generates police reports based on body camera recordings. The policing tech giant Axon has gained significant attention for its report generation software across the country, including in Maine.
But Code Four is unique in several ways. Unlike Axon’s technology, which relies on bodycam audio to draft a narrative, Code Four uses “computer vision” to generate drafts based on both audio and video. And unlike Axon, which is one of the largest police tech companies in the world, Code Four is less than a year old. Cheng, its co-founder and CEO, is only 19.
In a recent interview with The Maine Monitor, Cheng touted time-saving benefits he said could improve public safety.
“Essentially, we make it so that the patrol is reviewing the reports rather than writing the reports from scratch,” he said. “We transcribe all the interviews, all the phone calls. We write those reports for the investigator, the detective, so that they’re able to put everything together into a case package, win the case and catch more criminals.”
After the AI generates a draft, an officer must edit it and sign off on its accuracy. To ensure that happens, Code Four inserts extraneous, random or incorrect information into the reports. If an officer doesn’t remove that information, they cannot submit a final draft.
Research on AI-assisted report writing is limited; no independent research has been conducted on Code Four’s system. But an early study on its competitors cast doubt on whether the process actually saves time.
Seth Watts, a professor at Texas State University, is one of a small number of researchers who have studied AI-powered police reports and body cameras. He had never heard of Code Four, but said even its audio-based competitors like Axon’s Draft One software can struggle to describe scenes accurately.
“There’s a lot of error there because of background noise: being on the side of a highway, of trucks driving by,” he said. “If you’re pulling data from audio … the reason that it might not be saving time is because officers then have to edit substantially.”
Draft One made headlines in January after a report generated by its software for a Utah police department claimed an officer shape-shifted into a frog. The AI had seemingly picked up audio from a movie playing in the background during the incident.
Add video to the mix, and the possibility for errors may grow.
“I have a hard time seeing how [video-based reports] could be very accurate under the conditions in which these encounters can take place,” Watts said. “Maybe for the run-of-the-mill encounter that’s not very volatile, it might be fine. But for others, the error rate might be much higher.”
Police reports are often a key piece of evidence in court. Some prosecutors are concerned that using an AI model to draft reports could undermine cases. In Seattle, a county prosecutor recently banned police departments from using them because of the potential for errors.
District Attorney Neil McLean, whose jurisdiction includes Franklin County, said his office is still looking at how AI-generated reports may be used in court. He was not aware that Wilton, or any department in his district, was using AI-generated reports. He had not heard of Code Four.
“To the best of my knowledge, they shouldn’t be using it to generate reports,” he said. “It’s not something that my office, or our PDs, have agreed is ready for use.”
The algorithms powering AI police reports are generally “black boxes,” Watts said. It’s hard to know what data any AI model has been trained on or what impact that data may have on policing outcomes.
Some groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, have raised concerns about bias — AI models can absorb biased perceptions from whatever data they’re trained on — and accountability. Cheng dismissed worry about racial bias working its way into Code Four’s reports and said that the officer who signs off on a report is ultimately responsible for its content. All reports generated with Code Four include a disclaimer that it was written with the assistance of AI.
Kyes did not immediately respond to questions about accuracy or bias concerns. He told The Monitor previously that when the department first began using the product, they offered feedback on the software.
“Over the last six months, each version has improved and many of our suggestions have been implemented,” he said in an email.
About 50 police departments in the country are using Code Four; Wilton Police is the first in Maine. The police chief in the neighboring town of Jay, which is in talks with Wilton about sharing police services, said that he has been in touch with Cheng about accessing Code Four, but nothing has been finalized.
So far, Wilton is not paying for the software. Cheng said that the department has no contract with the company, as he has provided a year of the software for free. If the department decides to continue using it, they will pay $50 per officer per month, or about $3,000 to $5,000 a year for the small department.
Axon’s software, Draft One, is often purchased as part of a bundle with cameras made by the company, making direct cost comparisons difficult. Draft One has been used by several departments in Maine, including sheriff’s offices in Somerset County and Cumberland County. The town of Oakland also signed off on a $126,000 five-year contract for 12 cameras and access to Draft One last year, though a department official said that as of early February, the contract was not finalized.
Cheng added that his company has reached out to larger police departments in Maine and hopes to expand.
“If we are able to get Wilton, Maine, and make them happy, they can intro us to nearby departments as well, for example, the larger departments of Maine,” he said. “Maybe like Portland or Bangor.”
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.