Copgadget company Axon offers an AI service that transcribes bodycam audio and turns it into an automatic police report, which officers can edit and sign off on. There are two big problems with it: first, it doesn’t show who wrote what, and second, it doesn’t keep a version/edit history. An Axon executive admitted this is by design, to help police with their “disclosure headaches.” The EFF raises the alarm about Draft One’s killer feature: avoiding transparency.

“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—so basically the officer generates that draft, they make their edits, if they submit it into our Axon records system then that’s the only place we store it, if they copy and paste it into their third-party RMS [records management system] system as soon as they’re done with that and close their browser tab, it’s gone. It’s actually never stored in the cloud at all so you don’t have to worry about extra copies floating around.”

To reiterate: Axon deliberately does not store the original draft written by the Gen AI, because “the last thing” they want is for cops to have to provide that data to anyone (say, a judge, defense attorney or civil liberties non-profit). 

One of Axon’s first customers was Frederick Police Department in Colorado. Here’s what Krisy O’ Hayre, Executive Administrator at Frederick Police Department, had to say about it: “We love having new toys until the public gets wind of them.”

As the EFF puts it: “There is no meaningful way to audit Draft One usage, whether you’re a police chief or an independent researcher, because Axon designed it that way. “

You can read our full report, which details what we found in those documents, how we filed those public records requests, and how you can file your own, here. 

Previously:
• Axon makes false statements to town that bought its police bodycams, threatens to tase their credit-rating if they cancel the contract
• Juvenile criminal defense attorneys forced to agree to Taser’s terms of service to see the state’s evidence
• TJ Maxx and Marshalls workers wearing bodycams