For the first time, Somerset County sheriff’s deputies could soon wear body cameras.

And those cameras may come with a new technology: artificial intelligence, known commonly as AI.

The county’s Board of Commissioners voted Wednesday to give Sheriff Dale Lancaster the green light to move forward with exploring a service contract with Axon, the company that makes the AI-powered body camera technology. The company says its technology transcribes audio from the body cameras and can generate a “Draft One” police report for human review within minutes of an incident ending.

Proponents of the technology say it will save deputies time, freeing up overwhelmed police to more actively patrol and do other work instead of spending hours in the office writing police reports about incidents. But as in other applications of AI technology, questions remain about how exactly it will be implemented in the criminal justice system.

In a test of the product, Lancaster said deputies reported saving time in their report writing.

“Across the board, they said they saved 15 to 20 minutes per report,” he told the commissioners. “And, so, if they handle 15 to 20 cases a shift, do the math.”

The county’s contract would include cruiser cameras, already used by the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office from another vendor, and body cameras, used by some other law enforcement agencies across the state but not the Sheriff’s Office.

In addition to patrol deputies, the body cameras could also be worn by corrections officers at the Somerset County Jail, Lancaster said. Currently, some jail operations, such as jail cell extractions, require a supervisor to use a handheld camera.

The decision to move forward with finalizing a contract came after the board heard a presentation from an Axon sales representative at its Aug. 21 meeting.

Lancaster told the commissioners in August that he had been opposed to the idea of body cameras but changed his mind after attending a presentation about Axon’s new AI technology. His office has also been experiencing difficulties with its current patrol cruiser cameras, which are made by WatchGuard, now owned by Motorola.

“What really sold me on the whole body camera concept was that it’s also going to incorporate AI,” Lancaster said at that meeting.

In April, Axon announced the launch of its Draft One AI technology, according to a press release from the company. The Arizona-headquartered company was formerly known as TASER International for its namesake nonlethal Taser weapons, commonly used by law enforcement agencies.

Kevin Watson, the Axon sales representative at the commissioners’ meeting in August, explained the Draft One technology uses AI to convert footage from body cameras worn by a police officer into a first draft of a police report.

The technology processes the audio from the recording and generates a transcript, which is then turned into a police-report-style narrative for the deputy or officer to review, edit and revise, Watson said. The final report can then be copied directly into the records management software already used by the Sheriff’s Office and district attorney’s office.

The system where the video data goes exceeds a widely recognized cybersecurity standard, Watson said. Federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection, use that same platform for their data, he said.

A TIME SAVER

According to its marketing materials, Axon has been pushing the AI software as a time-saving tool for law enforcement agencies. On its website, the company calls it a “force multiplier” and states police officers currently spend up to 40% of their time on the job writing reports.

“It’s putting deputies back into the job they want to be doing,” Watson told the county commissioners.

Sheriff Lancaster said he decided to embrace the new technology — what he called “an evolution of policing” — because of the time it would save in report writing.

Patrol deputies must write a report for every call they respond to, Lancaster said. Even if a deputy responds to an incident only to assist a colleague, that deputy must also file a supplemental report, he said.

The Sheriff’s Office, on average, responds to several hundred calls per week, according to information Lancaster and his chief deputy regularly present at commissioners’ meetings.

“If we’re able to use AI to our advantage, deputies will be doing less time in front of their computer,” Lancaster said in August, “and we’ll have more proactive policing because they won’t be inside or at a keyboard.”

As an example, Lancaster told the commissioners that deputies could dedicate more time to traffic enforcement, given that the number of fatal crashes in the county has increased this year.

Lancaster and County Administrator Tim Curtis said they view that time savings as a way to attract employees, too, for the  law enforcement agency that like many others in Maine has struggled with staffing in recent years.

“This is a recruitment and retention tool,” Curtis said at the meeting, “because we lose patrol deputies to other counties where they’re doing three to five cases a day and we’re doing 25 cases a day, because our population is larger and our coverage area is much higher.”

QUESTIONS OF ACCURACY

Having launched earlier this year, few law enforcement agencies have adopted Axon’s AI technology so far.

Axon’s Draft One technology was being used to some extent in Oklahoma City; Lafayette, Indiana; and Fort Collins, Colorado, among other municipalities, the Associated Press reported in August.

In Maine, agencies that use Axon’s body cameras — not necessarily the Draft One AI feature — include the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, the Aroostook County Sheriff’s Office, the Oxford County Sheriff’s Office, and the Portland Police Department, according to Watson, the sales representative.

Portland police and Cumberland County sheriff’s deputies have been testing the AI feature since May, Watson told the Somerset County commissioners.

Media relations representatives at Axon did not return voicemails and emails seeking more information about law enforcement agencies in Maine using the company’s products.

Among the five Somerset County commissioners, some had questions about how the judicial system has or will treat reports generated in part by AI.

Lancaster emphasized to the Board of Commissioners at its last two meetings that the deputy would still need to review and revise the report before signing off on it. The AI-generated report, as the name of Axon’s software suggests, is just a first draft, he said.

In court, a deputy would still need to testify to the accuracy of a report, as is the case for entirely human-written reports, Lancaster said.

He said his office has discussed the use of the technology with the office of District Attorney Maeghan Maloney, the top prosecutor in Somerset and Kennebec counties.

Prosecutors in the DA’s office have been learning about the technology and are willing to give it a try, Maloney said.

“I’m always in support of trying something new,” Maloney said in a phone call.

Maloney said her concerns about accuracy largely went away because prosecutors can reference the original body camera video, the AI-produced transcript, and the final, edited report. In that way, she said, prosecutors would have more information to use in their cases.

Axon states the AI-generated reports may be of better quality than those composed by humans alone. Axon conducted a study involving experts, such as district attorneys, field operations command staff and inclusion scholars regarding the accuracy of AI-assisted reports, according to its website.

“Results showed that Draft One reports are equal to officer-only reports in terms of comprehensiveness, neutrality and objectivity, and Draft One reports were rated more highly when it came to terminology and coherence,” Axon states on its website. “In short, Draft One reports can help agencies improve the quality and consistency of their reports.”

Even so, on the other side of the aisle, some defense attorneys have doubts about the technology.

John Alsop, the county commissioner who represents Cornville and Skowhegan, said he supported the county’s purchase of the technology. But Alsop, a lawyer who has worked as both a prosecutor and defense attorney in Maine, warned Lancaster at Wednesday’s meeting to expect “squawking” from defense attorneys.

Tina Nadeau, executive director of the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said in response to questions that using AI to review recordings and write reports is “rife with problems — ethically and legally.”

“A report is supposed to encapsulate an officer’s own memory and perceptions — not AI’s interpretations of such,” Nadeau wrote in a statement. “How are they to parse out what is AI generated and what is actually based on their own memory? We cannot cross-examine the AI program.”

“Additionally, if the AI-generated text is used in say, a sworn affidavit, the law enforcement officer cannot swear to the truth and accuracy of the statements generated by AI,” Nadeau continued.

Nadeau, however, said in her statement that defense attorneys are always open to conversations with law enforcement about their use of new technology and how it may impact defendants.

“From what has been presented thus far, I only see this planned use as problematic at best,” Nadeau said.

Axon CEO Rick Smith, in an interview with The Associated Press, recognized concerns about the product, saying it is important that law enforcement officers must testify to the accuracy of their reports.

Smith also said the company has held off on implementing video processing in its AI functionality because of possible issues with race and other identities.

FUTURE COST

It is not clear when the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office would fully adopt the technology, since the commissioners haven’t yet authorized its purchase. Lancaster is expected to return to the Board of Commissioners once he receives a final proposed contract.

Curtis, the administrator, said at Wednesday’s meeting that a rough estimate for the contract is $100,000 per year for five years.

In the county’s current budget, Curtis said, spending on patrol cruiser cameras totals about $57,000. That means entering the contract this year, during the current budget year, would require approximately $43,000 more.

Commissioners appeared to support the additional expenditure, though no vote on funding was taken Wednesday. A request for proposals, which the county requires for many large purchases, would not make sense in this case because Axon is the only vendor that makes this specific technology, Curtis told the commissioners.

Curtis and Finance Director Patrick Dolan said they believe the roughly $43,000 can be made available by projected savings in several other budgeted areas between the Sheriff’s Office and the Somerset County Jail.

Lancaster’s staff is also preparing applications for grants that would help fund the acquisition of the cameras, Curtis said.

“I think we can actually bring it in (so) that it doesn’t impact the budget at all,” Dolan said Wednesday.

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