The technology is billed as a “virtual sergeant” — an omnipresent artificial intelligence capable of reviewing every minute of every police officer’s body camera footage across an entire department, analyzing how each officer handled every call.
The Aurora Police Department plans to implement just such AI tech in the near future, becoming the first law enforcement agency in Colorado to do so.
The department is finalizing a contract with Truleo, a company that uses artificial intelligence software to analyze police officers’ speech as recorded by their own body cameras. The software not only transcribes the audio and looks for keywords, but interprets the meaning of what officers say and analyzes text in context.
Truleo then looks for speech that either displays professionalism — like politeness, gratitude or offering an explanation — or is evidence of negative behaviors, such as insults, profanity and threats. It can flag potentially negative interactions to supervisors as well as measure an officer’s professionalism.
The Aurora Police Department, like many other law enforcement agencies, does not have the bandwidth to review the thousands of hours of body camera footage recorded every week, interim Chief Art Acevedo said. Not only will the technology help the department identify questionable actions by officers, but it will also find examples of good work.
“This is a tool that will help us identify the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said.
Several other police agencies across the country are using Truleo, though one major department paused its use of the technology due to pushback from civil rights advocates and its own officers. Civil rights leaders in Colorado said the public must be involved in decisions about when and how police can use artificial intelligence.
The Aurora Police Department does not have an exact date for rolling out the technology as the contract has not yet been finalized, Acevedo said. The contract will be presented to the Aurora City Council and will cost approximately $200,000 a year, he said. That’s a small fraction of the 928-person department’s $150 million budget.
“If it were up to me we would’ve started yesterday,” he said.
One of the company’s co-founders, Anthony Tassone, called Truleo a “virtual sergeant” who is reviewing every officer’s every action.
“We’re a solution to a huge problem in policing in that they are spread thin and there is not a deep supervisory layer,” he said.
The technology can tell whether an officer uses force by looking for phrases like “stop …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – News