An artificial intelligence startup that lets police officers generate incident reports from body camera footage is expanding its foothold in Maine.
Code Four, which first entered the state when it provided its software to Wilton police, now has a contract with Rockland’s police department and is in talks with Augusta’s.
Rockland has been using it for several months, Deputy Chief Alex Gaylor said. What started with a free trial led to a year-long contract between the department and Code Four.
“It gets the paperwork done a little quicker,” he said, adding that the AI-generated reports often have more detail.
Code Four’s growth in Maine is part of a broader national trend. AI report-drafting software has spread to hundreds of U.S. police departments over the past two years, with vendors promising to save officers hours of paperwork even as prosecutors, researchers and civil rights groups raise unresolved questions about accuracy and oversight.
Code Four alone has grown to nearly 140 law enforcement customers nationwide, up from about 50 in February, according to co-founder and chief executive George Cheng, who developed the software as a 19-year-old.
The Silicon Valley company’s expansion puts it in direct competition with Axon’s Draft One, the more-established AI report-writing software already used by several Maine departments and the target of most of the national scrutiny.
Code Four is meant to save officers time on report writing by generating draft incident reports in minutes. Officers are required by the software to make edits before signing off on the reports, including removing obscure or intentionally incorrect words the company calls “Easter eggs,” a safeguard meant to stop officers from submitting AI drafts without reviewing them.
The company touts its use of both audio and video to generate report drafts as a safeguard compared with Axon, which just uses audio. However, experts have said this could increase the possibility for errors to arise.
High-profile AI “hallucinations” have put Axon under the microscope. One draft report in Utah got headlines in January after it described an officer shape-shifting into a frog, after the body camera had apparently picked up audio from a movie playing in the background of an incident. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported last year that Draft One lacked adequate oversight and transparency mechanisms industrywide.
But Gaylor said Rockland hasn’t had any issues with hallucinations while using Code Four, and stressed that officers must check the AI-generated report drafts before submitting them.
Cheng has said Code Four’s software complies with the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division security standards, which govern data encryption, cybersecurity and access controls, and has argued that certification will separate compliant vendors from competitors as adoption accelerates nationally.
The company relies heavily on word of mouth to spread between police departments, Cheng said. Rockland police signed up for the software after asking Wilton’s chief about his experience.
“Once you make some department satisfied, like Wilton … the rest will kind of follow a little bit,” Cheng said.
Code Four also recently offered a free trial of its product to the Augusta Police Department. Staff Sgt. Eric Lloyd, a spokesperson, told a reporter the department has asked Code Four for a cost estimate but is not using the software currently.
Not all officers in Rockland have opted to use Code Four. Gaylor said some officers have decided against using the software, which generates reports quickly but can require time-consuming edits.
“It’s not the end-all, be-all, golden goose,” he said. “But it certainly has its use, and I think the biggest thing is it can save some officers some time.”
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.