American cops are using AI to draft police reports, and the ACLU isn't happy
theregister.com
theregister.com
Why? There are at least 5 common generative ai services (which display different behaviors depending on how they’re prompted and what has previously been in the context), there are hundreds of thousands of open models, millions of different ways you could set up retrieval augmented generation, infinite ways you can prompt.
That said It is quite easy (for professors for example) to pick up on common linguistic and structural patterns. (Chat gpt uses certain words more commonly, structures arguments in a particular way, uses and misuses the same metaphorical structures)
Or just stop responding to nonviolent crime, which already happens. We’ve got to be realistic about the tradeoffs.
Don't believe it. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cops earn more than software engineers in many states. Half, or more, of most municipal budgets go towards police salaries, benefits and pensions. Some of the highest paid public employees, if not the highest paid employees, on any government's payroll are police.
Most cops sit in their cars for hours waiting for something to happen, often accruing overtime in the process. They have plenty of time to play Candy Crush, hard to believe they have no time for paperwork.
I simply went on the BLS website (that you mentioned) and looked. In all 12 states with the lowest SDE salaries, the SDE mean wage is still higher than the police, and in all 10 states with the highest police salaries, their mean wage is still less than SDEs. I also spot checked other random states and have not found a single one where police get paid more.
Look for yourself, data from May 2023:
> (2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data.
It is not accounting for overtime pay at all, it’s using the hourly wage multiplied by what they consider to be full time employment.
From your links a software developer makes 63$ per hour in Napa, CA while a cop makes 59$ per hour, it wouldn’t take much overtime at $88.50 to surpass the salaried developer in yearly income. Cops also get pensions in many areas, so if we consider total comp I think it’s safe to say there are places where police are making more money than software developers.
If the paperwork load is unreasonable there’s an obvious solution. (Reduce the paperwork)
Generative ai will make things up. It’ll be inadmissible as evidence once judges catch on.
> Or just stop responding to nonviolent crime, which already happens. We’ve got to be realistic about the tradeoffs.
Oh come on, your reason is pretty fundamentally flawed. This technology is new, so police aren't going to "stop" doing anything if they don't use it, because its unavailability is the status quo.
I think it's highly likely that your "imagine 2 hours per report for a 2 hour incident" is a number you pulled out of your butt. But you, me, and everyone should want these reports to be accurate.
If the problem is that there are too many questions, then reduce the number of questions.
There are probably many questions to help with filing reports and searching them later. It may no longer be necessary to have those fields if AI can deduce them from a single free form text field, for example.
I hope the police apps keep track of exactly what words and inputs came from the officer, and which came from the AI.
Of course, that's to say nothing of criminal cases
Of course, there's the problem that cops don't want to be recorded.
Let’s say you fall in the shower and you are badly injured. You call 911, and the police are first to arrive. Officers enter your house and try to keep you calm until an ambulance arrives.
You think police body camera footage of you, naked and injured on your bathroom floor, should be “transparently available and searchable”?
How do you feel about the weaker claim that footage of all police action in public spaces should be available and searchable?
I have trouble with that, too.
Being a crime victim should not mean that video footage of yourself in the immediate aftermath of the crime is publicly available and searchable. Imagine that a young girl is walking her family dog in a park, and that she is attacked and raped. The girl calls the police, who respond to the park. I don’t think that footage should be publicly available and searchable.
Also, “footage of all police action in public spaces” would routinely include information like people’s names, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers.
I am in favor of transparency, but I don’t think that absolute transparency would be a net benefit to society.
If the task to write 4+ pages is menial reform the questions asked so it's 1 page and meaningful.
THAT is the right way and not AI LLM blabber
The business model for LLMs will be that no one is liable. They were for a while, like when the airline chatbot quoted a lowball fare and was forced to accept it. But that will be rolled back as the stakes get higher.
“Your honor the police department uses ai to generate police reports. Exhibit 1) shows numerous studies showing that hallucinations are common in generative AI. I therefore request that the police report be removed from evidence in the case against my client.”
Can't say I'm surprised that software isn't included in the moral panic about AI usage on HN. Despite as a group using it secure people's private data, handle people's money, process insurance claims, etc.. When we use it we understand that we're still experts evaluating and editing the output but when other people do it they're lazy, careless, and actively malicious. Do you really have a problem with AI or do you just not trust the cops regardless of what tools they use?
"What do you mean by 'we', Kemo Sabe?" -- I don't use LLMs, and I do indeed have a problem with them.
Just because conflicting opinions can be found within a large group (i.e. HN commentators) does not mean every member of the group is a self-contradicting weirdo. (Fallacy of composition.)
Now ask the AI producers/users to accept personal liability based on a stochastic probability machine. I imagine you won't see many hands raising to take you up on the offer.