Most cops join the profession of law enforcement to better their communities and fight for people who are being victimized by criminals. But what a lot of them end up doing for much of their work shifts is typing. It’s estimated that 30 to 40% of the average American patrol officer’s work shift is consumed by the process of writing reports. And continuing to expend that time is untenable in an era when so many law enforcement agencies are understaffed and can’t answer calls as quickly as the public demands. That’s why so many agencies are looking for a way to speed up the report writing process.

Axon now believes it has a solution. Rick Smith, CEO of Axon, started talking about the possibility of using body cameras to make report writing easier and faster nearly a decade ago. Earlier this year, the company introduced a tool—called Draft One—that may make Smith’s proposal a reality.

 CHAT GPT

Noah Spitzer-Williams, Axon’s senior principle product manager for Draft One, says Draft One’s development was spurred by the November 2022 release of the generative artificial intelligence tool Chat GPT. “We started asking ourselves, what it would it be like if we fed this thing body camera transcripts and asked it to produce a report,” he explains.

Axon’s early experiments were very encouraging, and the company’s report writing solution team decided to concentrate on how to adapt the technology for law enforcement. “It was just an opportunity too great for us to pass up,” Spitzer-Williams says.

Of course, you can’t just feed a body camera transcript into Chat GPT and get a professional-quality police report. There were many long days ahead for the Draft One development team before the product would be ready for field experiments and a lot of expertise had to be tapped to provide input on what was really needed in a report. “The vast majority of the work was consulting with law enforcement, prosecutors, public defenders, and community groups,” Spitzer-Williams says.

He adds that Draft One is not really using Chat GPT but the large language model that is the foundation of Chat GPT. One of the things this allows the Axon developers to do is fine-tune the Chat GPT engine to eliminate its well-documented tendencies toward embellishment. “The creativity is turned down to zero. We just want to stick to the facts from the audio.”

 AUDIO ONLY

The first thing any user of Draft One has to know is that the technology can only use the audio track of the recording. It can’t see. It can only transcribe and analyze what was said by the officer(s) and the contact(s).

Spitzer-Williams says Draft One uses a two-step process to create the initial report. That process begins when the officer ends the recording of the video. The audio track is then automatically sent to the Axon cloud for a full verbatim transcript of the interaction. “That transcript is what we are feeding into the large language model, along with a set of instructions that teach it how to take that transcript and create a police report narrative out of it.”

One of the trickiest aspects of law enforcement contact transcription is that it can be very “messy data,” as Spitzer-Williams says. Police are often contacting people who are drunk, on various drugs, mentally ill, angry, or emotional distraught because of the trauma they just experienced. There can also be a lot of shouting people on a recording, particularly at a domestic situation. Spitzer-Williams suggests that customers concerned about the quality of such transcripts, test out the technology with existing recordings. He adds that most officers who have done so have been impressed at Draft One’s capability. “We’ve been testing a lot of different solutions over the years to make sure that we accommodate these things, including accents and background noises from other officers and first responders on scene.”

Spitzer-Williams also stresses that Axon is not touting Draft One as an automatic law enforcement report writing system. It’s literally what it says in the product name, a first draft.

“For the vast majority of incidents, we’re able to produce a good starting point for the officer,” Spitzer-Williams says. “We can get you 70 to 80% to a complete report. And when you’re writing reports three to four hours per day, that 70 to 80% is a meaningful amount of time that Draft One can save.”

OFFICER RESPONSIBILITY

When using Draft One to speed up the report writing process, the responsibility for producing the complete report remains with the officer.

It takes about six minutes for Draft One to produce a working version of the report. The officer just has to login to Axon Evidence and the file will be waiting for them. The file can be used in two different workflows: one for Axon Records (the company’s proprietary records management system) and the other for non-Axon RMS systems. Spitzer-Williams says it works well with either platform, but it offers a “more seamless” workflow in the Axon Records RMS.

After opening the file, the officer can review the initial draft of the report, edit it, add more content, and proofread it. The system even prompts the officer with queries about information that is not complete. Spitzer-Williams says the queries make sure that officers give the report the time necessary to make it a professional documentation of the facts.

“We’re trying to thread the needle between two extremes,” he says. “We want to save officers time and have them produce quality reports. But it shouldn’t be too easy to breeze through the experience. So we want to make sure there are enough friction points that they take all the steps seriously.”

IN THE FIELD

Axon says Draft One is being used in the field by numerous agencies and not just on a test-and-evaluation basis. They have subscribed.

Spitzer-Williams says one police commander told him that his agency has the funding for an additional 10 officers and can’t fill the positions. “He has recommended to his chief that they subscribe to Draft One instead. The plan is to use Draft One as a force multiplier to make the existing officers more efficient.”

Subscribers to Draft One can control how and when the system. The default setting is that the system will not work on felony incidents or those that involve arrests. The idea is that officers need to get used to working with Draft One on easier reports before using it for more complicated reports. Agencies have the option to maintain the default setting or turn it off. “We perform just fine on felonies and arrests,” Spitzer-Williams says. “It’s just that we want agencies to very explicitly opt into supporting those applications because the stakes are so high.”

Numerous agencies are already so adept at making Draft One reports that they are now using it for felonies, according to Spitzer-Williams. The next level would be using Draft One for critical incidents, including officer-involved shootings. Spitzer-Williams says he can’t say for sure whether any of Draft One’s users have produced critical incident reports with Draft One, but he will say it’s likely “given the amount of usage we are seeing.”

Spitzer-Williams believes Draft One’s usage has grown so rapidly since its April introduction because it not only makes report writing faster, it makes the reports better. “Users tell us it’s just better for spelling and grammar and completeness. Officers are often writing their reports hours after the incident has occurred because they are on back-to-back calls. It’s easy to forget some details. Draft One helps with that problem.”