California Governor Newsom signed SB 524, a bill that begins the long process of regulating and imposing transparency on the growing problem of AI-written police reports. EFF supported this bill and spent the last year criticize vocally companies offering AI-generated police reports as a service.
SB524 requires the police to disclose, in the report, whether the report was used to prepare a police report in whole or in part. Additionally, it prohibits sellers from selling or sharing information that a police department has provided to the AI.
The bill is also important because it requires departments to maintain all different versions of the report so that judges, defense attorneys or auditors can easily see which parts of the final report were written by the officer and which parts were written by the computer. This creates major problems for police who use the most popular product in this area: Axon’s Draft One. By design, Draft One does not keep an editing log of who wrote what.. Now, to stay in compliance with the law, police departments will either need Axon to modify their product, or officers will have to take it upon themselves to go and keep evidence of what each subsequent modification and draft of their report looked like. Or, the police may abandon Axon’s Draft One altogether.
EFF will continue to monitor whether departments are complying with this state law.
After UtahCalifornia became the second state to pass legislation that begins to address this problem. Due to the lack of transparency in how police services purchase and deploy technologiesIt is often unclear whether police departments are using AI to write reports, how generative AI chooses to translate audio into narrative, and which parts of the reports are written by AI and which parts are written by officers. The EFF has written a guide to help you file public records requests that may shed light on your police department’s use of AI to write police reports.
It remains unclear whether products like Draft One violate records retention laws and what impact AI-written police reports will have on the criminal justice system. We will need to consider more comprehensive regulation, or perhaps even a ban on this use of generative AI. But SB 524 is a good first step. We hope that more states will follow the lead of California and Utah and pass even stricter bills.
