As some patrol officers in the Twin Cities are starting to use artificial intelligence for composing their reports, the St. Paul Police Department isn’t yet taking the leap to the cutting-edge Axon Draft One.
The department recently implemented its first policy on the use of AI. St. Paul police major crime investigators have already been using AI technology to transcribe interviews with victims, witnesses and suspects.
The policy came about because “as a department, we realized that technology is rapidly advancing, and we need to go with the times,” said St. Paul Police Cmdr. Michele Giampolo, who’s in charge of the technology unit. “We needed to have a policy in place to safeguard … private data.”
Erin Hayes, a St. Paul Police Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission member, said the community and commission should have had the opportunity to weigh in before the department implemented its AI policy.
“I don’t want to say that AI shouldn’t be used in criminal justice work, because there could be some benefit, but we have to have really good guardrails laid down, and we have to know where the data is going and who is using our data,” Hayes said.
Police leaders say AI technology like Axon Draft One saves time, allowing officers to more quickly get back to patrolling. It uses audio from officers’ Axon body cameras and drafts a police report, to which officers are then prompted to add details and check for accuracy.
Draft One does not generate information about what the surroundings look like or what is happening in the body camera video, said Eagan Police Lt. Nate Tennessen. Eagan police are using Draft One for non-felony offenses.
“This sticks to the facts within the transcript of the audio only, so it’s objective AI,” he said. “It’s making no assumptions of the video.”
With the key role that police reports have in investigations and prosecutions, some people raise concerns about the implications of law enforcement using Draft One and say there should be opportunities for public input.
“When we’re potentially sending people to prison based on police reports, obviously we want to have an accurate, clear and unbiased portrayal of what happened,” said Alicia Granse, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota.
The Dakota and Hennepin county attorney’s offices, which primarily handle felonies, don’t accept Draft One reports. A Ramsey County Attorney’s Office policy issued in August says law enforcement have to notify them if they’re using AI tools for investigative purposes.
The Eagan City Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors, accepts the Eagan Police Department’s Draft One reports for prosecutions, Tennessen said.
St. Paul police: No short-term plan to use Draft One
Until a couple of years ago, St. Paul major crime investigators who interviewed victims, witnesses or suspects were tasked with typing transcripts of exactly who said what.
The hours-long process entailed investigators listening back to audio from video cameras in interview rooms.
Since the department upgraded the cameras, investigators can now use an automated transcription process. The police department says that’s the only way they’re using AI in reports at this time.
Police Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission member Dan Featherstone, speaking at the commission’s November meeting, asked if the St. Paul Police Department intends to use Axon Draft One.
“We have no plan, at least in the short term,” replied St. Paul Police Cmdr. John Cajacob, who oversees the internal affairs unit. “I don’t know long term. There’s no current plan.”
If the use of Draft One comes up, PCIARC chairperson Sarah Florman said she “would highly recommend” that it’s “discussed well in advance of implementation with the commission and ideally with the community. There’s a lot of bright red flags with that particular technology that concerns me.”
Cajacob said, based on his conversations with department leadership, “there’s no question” they’d seek community feedback if they expand AI use to Draft One.
The PCIARC, comprised of St. Paul residents, reviews civilian-initiated complaints of police misconduct, and makes disciplinary and policy recommendations to the police chief.
How Twin Cities police are using Draft One
Bloomington and Brooklyn Park police each have 15 officers using Draft One in a pilot program for misdemeanor-level offenses. Woodbury police have seen a demonstration and are considering a limited trial.
“This produces a report very quickly and what we’re experiencing is highly detailed reports,” said Brooklyn Park Police Inspector Matt Rabe.
Officers are required to review and add to the report. As a safeguard, the Eagan department automatically has a function that adds what Lt. Tennessen calls “unicorn and wizard sentences” in Draft One reports.
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“It’ll be an outlandish sentence” that shows up in a report and officers need to find it in their review and delete it before signing off on the report, he said.
Using Draft One has led to officers providing more narration about what they’re seeing when they’re on a scene, so their audio comments are captured on body camera and then reflected in the report, said Tennessen and Rabe.
For example, officers will say, as their body camera is recording, “I’m responding to a report of damage to a vehicle at this address. The caller identified themselves as such and such with this phone number,” Rabe said. “I see a scratch on the driver’s side, front bumper of the vehicle.”
There’s a disclosure in the reports that they were generated with Axon Draft One, Rabe and Tennessen added.
Axon contracts for body cameras, more
The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office issued its own policy about AI use in August. It says their prosecutors are required to know if any law enforcement agency’s case “includes evidence developed or arrests made based on the use of AI.”
They notified law enforcement agencies across the county, said spokesman Dennis Gerhardstein. The county attorney’s office is “aware of only a handful of cases from SPPD that include AI assistance,” he said. “We have not heard back from other … agencies per their intent to use AI in the investigative process.”
St. Paul homicide, robbery and sex crimes investigators are among those using Axon Auto-Transcribe when they conduct interviews in the department’s conference rooms that are equipped with video cameras, said Giampolo, the technology commander. They’re required to listen to the video, and check and fix the transcript for accuracy before including it in their reports, she said.
The St. Paul police contract with Axon for this year is nearly $2 million, which includes body cameras, squad cameras, tasers, Auto-Transcribe, data storage and more. The Eagan police contract is $6 million for 10 years and includes similar elements.
When it comes to facial recognition, St. Paul police say they do not have technology that uses it. The department asked the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office analysis unit, which has facial-recognition technology, for assistance in identifying suspects 23 times this year as of Nov. 5, according to Alyssa Arcand, a St. Paul police spokeswoman.
The requests are to help solve serious crimes and represent a small percent of the 8,000 to 10,000 major crime investigations St. Paul police conduct each year, Arcand said.
St. Paul review commissioners wanted to weigh in
At the St. Paul Police Civilian Internal Affairs Review Commission’s Nov. 5 meeting, Commissioner Hayes said she appreciated receiving the police department’s AI policy, but added, “What I don’t appreciate is that this policy was put into place prior to this meeting. To me, I thought we had been on a really good path of collaborating and looking at policy.”
Cajacob, the internal affairs commander, said he sent the policy to the PCIARC coordinator on Oct. 13. It was implemented Oct. 17.
He said he knows it was “a short period of time,” and added, “Our policies are not set in stone. It’s important that we always have … feedback and we’re able to adapt things … so certainly, it’s an ongoing discussion.”
PCIARC Coordinator Sierra Cumberland said she believed it was the department’s draft policy on AI when she sent information to the commissioners on Oct. 21 and requested feedback by their Nov. 5 meeting. She said she hadn’t been told what date the policy would take effect and didn’t know the department had already implemented it.
How prosecutors are handling AI
The Dakota County and Hennepin County attorney’s offices, usually prosecuting felonies, do not accept law enforcement reports that utilized Draft One.
The Dakota County Attorney’s Office “is examining and considering” whether to accept them, according to County Attorney Kathy Keena.
Law enforcement interviews that were transcribed using AI are accepted, said Morgan Kunz, Hennepin County Attorney’s Office criminal division director.
The difference is, with the body camera audio used in Draft One, “they’re usually out in the field, there’s often lots of things going on. The audio can be of less quality than you would get in an interview room with an interview being conducted,” Kunz said.
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When an officer is making a decision to arrest someone, to search or to use force, for example, “they need to write a report explaining why they made that decision,” Kunz said. “An AI tool, listening to the audio, is essentially going back after the fact and creating a justification for something based on the audio. It’s not an articulation of why the police made that decision in the first place.”
The American Civil Liberties Union said last year that police departments should not allow officers to use AI, like Draft One, for reports.
If AI is being used for reports, ACLU of MN staff attorney Granse said there should be questions about what safeguards are in place to ensure officers are truly reviewing them before signing off on them.
Utah and California have implemented laws requiring police to disclose in a report if it was written using AI. Would the Minnesota ACLU want the Legislature to take that up?
“Certainly, it’s something that we’re interested in,” Granse said.
“Transparency is important, not only just the fact that AI was used, but what is the AI? How is it trained? How is it being coded?” she said.
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