MADISON — The call was largely routine: A dog running loose on East Madison Road, bothering some kids playing outside.

Sgt. Joseph Jackson, a patrol supervisor at the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office, asked a few questions to the man who made the complaint.

What is your name and date of birth? Why did you call us? What does the dog look like? Who owns it? Who are the kids? Where do they live?

But instead of jotting down the information in a notebook, Jackson activated his body-worn camera to record the conversation.

A few minutes later, the video footage and audio, just under two minutes long, was uploaded to a cloud-based system. With the click of a few buttons, software backed by artificial intelligence generated a transcription from the audio recording, and from that, a draft template of a narrative report with prompts in each paragraph for Jackson to add more information.

“This report, right now, is a good start for what I need to do,” Jackson said. “But I can’t do anything else with this until I’ve completed all of it.”

The goal of the software, called Draft One, is to speed up the writing of reports deputies must file for every call they respond to, from a violent assault to a report of a loose, menacing dog — which was a recent mock scenario with a reporter playing the role of concerned citizen speaking to Jackson at the Sheriff’s Office.

The Somerset County Sheriff’s Office now has fully deployed the body-worn cameras and AI software, made by Axon, for about six months. A group of deputies first tested the software in April 2024.

While some defense attorneys and civil liberties advocates remain skeptical of the use of AI in law enforcement, Somerset County deputies are saying the software is doing exactly what Axon promises in its marketing materials: saving them time behind the computer screen.

“AI is here. It’s not going to go away,” Sheriff Dale Lancaster said. “I feel it’s extremely important that we use it to our advantage. It is the evolution of law enforcement.”

But Lancaster, whose law enforcement career spans five decades, including several years in top command roles at the Maine State Police and the last 10 years as Somerset County sheriff, said he remains somewhat cautious of AI.

“When it gets to the point of we’re replacing humans, that’s when we need to say ‘OK, let’s stop,’ because there is nothing that can replace a human being, and I feel strongly about that,” Lancaster said.

AI CATCHES ON

Lancaster said using body-worn cameras, let alone AI, had been a goal for some time. His agency previously only used cruiser dash cameras.

When Lancaster brought the proposal to buy Axon’s products to the Somerset County Board of Commissioners last year, he pitched it as Axon does: Less time writing reports would translate to more time for other duties, which in turn could help with employee retention, he said.

Somerset County sheriff’s deputies, who patrol 4,000 square miles, write a lot of reports. A recent busy shift logged 38 calls for service, Lancaster said. Every call requires a report filed from each deputy who responds.

The commissioners in September approved a five-year, $840,000 contract with Axon. It included body-worn cameras for all patrol deputies and detectives, body-worn cameras for some corrections officers, cruiser cameras and the Draft One software.

Axon Enterprise, Inc., a publicly traded, Arizona-based company perhaps known best for its nonlethal Taser weapons, has become a leading supplier of body cameras and other law enforcement technology in recent years.

The company announced the launch of its Draft One report writing software in April 2024. In its marketing materials, Axon describes the AI software as a “force multiplier” and states police officers currently spend up to 40% of their time on the job writing reports, which can be cut down with AI’s help.

Axon says on its website that it uses models from OpenAI, the company behind chatbot ChatGPT, to generate the Draft One transcriptions. Data is not shared with ChatGPT’s public database, according to Axon.

“The model was calibrated by the Axon team to remove creativity or embellishments — often referred to as ‘hallucinations’ — that may be more common in consumer-grade AI solutions,” the website states.

Axon spokesperson Kristin Lowman declined to say how many agencies in Maine use its cameras and the Draft One software but said law enforcement agencies across the country are testing and using the software.

Neither the Maine Chiefs of Police Association nor the Maine Sheriffs Association had information about which law enforcement agencies use body-worn cameras or which brands they use.

The Somerset County Sheriff’s Office appears to be among the first agencies in Maine to fully implement the use of Draft One in day-to-day operations.

Elsewhere in central Maine, voters in Oakland recently approved the purchase of Axon’s body-worn cameras and Draft One for the town’s police department. The Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office is also pursuing a contract with Axon.

In southern Maine, the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office and Scarborough Police Department are both expecting to fully implement Draft One soon, agency leaders said.

And the Portland Police Department, one of the largest agencies in the state, is using Draft One to document non-criminal and civil matters, department spokesperson Brad Nadeau said.

FROM START TO FINISH

In Somerset County, deputies are not required to use Draft One. Lancaster said some still prefer to write reports from their traditional pen-and-paper notes.

The body-worn cameras, about the size of a smartphone but much thicker and heftier, activate automatically in some situations, like if a deputy draws a Taser. Generally, though, the deputy or detective has to turn on the camera manually, according to the situation. Activation settings and policies vary by agency.

Jackson, during his demonstration, said using the Axon cameras and Draft One has changed the way deputies approach their interactions on calls.

Because the software generates a transcript of the audio, it is more accurate if deputies narrate everything they do from the time they arrive on scene, he said. The transcript and subsequent report also tend to be more accurate when deputies repeat back information — such as the spelling of a person’s name — because the microphone is closer to their mouth.

Longer recordings tend to produce better reports, Jackson said, because Draft One has more information to process into a report.

Once the recording is uploaded, the deputy answers a few multiple-choice questions from Axon: the type of crime, if there was an arrest and how long they want the report to be.

After generating the report from those parameters, Draft One displays it on one side of the screen and the raw video and transcription on the other.

“When we do these reports, we also should be looking at these videos, to make sure that everything here is accurate to what our report is,” Jackson said, “because this is what we’re going to have to testify to in court.”

The report marks several areas where the deputy needs to fill in information. In the case of the loose dog, prompts included more information about the weather or any observations about the area.

The system does not allow the user to export the report until it is edited. The original unedited version is never saved.

Draft One automatically adds a disclaimer to the end of the report, which reads: “I acknowledge this report was generated using Draft One by Axon. I further acknowledge that I have reviewed the report in detail, made any necessary edits, and believe it to be an accurate representation of my recollection of the reported events. For further details, see Axon video of this incident.”

Along with the report, deputies can upload other digital files, like video from their cruiser cameras, photographs and other audio recordings.

The entire process can happen in the field on a laptop, which Jackson said spares deputies patrolling the unorganized territories the time of driving to the office to upload videos to a cloud-based server.

Both Lancaster and Jackson said the 11-paragraph report Draft One generated for the loose dog call was much more detailed than a report would have been previously. In the past, a report for an incident like that probably would have only been a few sentences, Lancaster said.

The level of detail may never be necessary for a simpler call, but capturing it — and doing so quickly instead of a few weeks later — has helped communication from one shift to the next, Lancaster said.

LEGAL QUESTIONS

Neither Lancaster nor Jackson was able to point to a specific criminal case with a Draft One report that resulted in a successful prosecution.

District Attorney Maeghan Maloney, the top prosecutor in Kennebec and Somerset counties, said she was certain some cases involving Draft One had reached a resolution in court, although she said she would have to do further research to identify specific ones or confirm if any had gone to trial.

Maloney said she has not heard any concerns about the reports generated by Draft One, aside from what she has read in the news media. The initial reports it generates are not unlike templates many law enforcement agencies have used, Maloney said.

“They’ve always written excellent reports, and they continue to be excellent,” Maloney said of the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office. “I know it’s a great report when I can watch the body camera video and all of the essential details that are necessary for proving a case are both in the body camera video and documented in the report.”

Maloney’s office, in both counties, has since contracted with Axon to switch to the company’s case management system, allowing for a more seamless flow of information from law enforcement agencies to prosecutors. It is also expected to help get defendants evidence faster during the discovery process, Maloney said.

Ryan Rutledge, an attorney with the Skowhegan law firm Mills, Shay, Lexier & Talbot, said he has seen several Draft One reports in his criminal defense work in Somerset County.

None of the reports has had any glaring errors, Rutledge said. But some appear more clearly written by AI than others, he said.

Police reports are generally not admissible as evidence at trial. But law enforcement officers on the witness stand often review them to refresh their memories of events that may have taken place years ago. And, Rutledge said, prosecutors often file criminal complaints — the initial charging document — based solely on an officer’s report.

“That’s part of the job,” Rutledge said. “It’s not a dull chore. It’s one of those important aspects of the entire criminal legal process because that’s where it all starts.”

Rutledge said defense attorneys in Maine have been keeping a close eye on Axon and Draft One, reviewing the company’s news releases and what its executives are saying. Civil liberties groups have also taken aim at the software in recent months.

In December 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union released a white paper urging police departments to stay away from AI that assists report writing.

The ACLU grouped its concerns into four main categories: the unreliability and bias in AI, the importance of an officer’s own recollection of an event, the lack of information about how the systems work, and the accountability that is lost when officers no longer have to sit down and write a report justifying their actions.

In a report this month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit founded to promote Internet civil liberties, said it found Draft One to dodge transparency and accountability following a study of public records from various jurisdictions. The group concluded that it was impossible to discern which parts of a report a human wrote and which parts AI generated.

In Maine, defense attorneys are working on a more uniform, concerted effort to ask prosecutors in their discovery requests to disclose more information about how Draft One works, Rutledge said. Both the inner workings of what the AI behind Draft One is prompted to do with recordings and early drafts of police reports that currently are not saved could potentially be the kind of evidence known commonly as Brady material, which prosecutors must disclose to the defendant, Rutledge said.

Whether prosecutors actually have access to that information is another question.

That kind of data is also largely hidden because, as a private company, Axon is shielded from public records laws, Rutledge said.

“I think the public deserves to know, and the defendant especially, what the prompt is and what the original draft looks like,” Rutledge said, “because the system itself could contain instructions that really skew what is being presented and then ultimately will impact the officer’s actual recall on the stand.”

Maloney, the district attorney, said the first draft that Draft One produces would be treated similar to an officer’s handwritten notes. Maine’s law court has held that as long as notes are destroyed when an officer completes a report, it is not a discovery violation for prosecutors to not provide them to the defense, Maloney said.

Plus, she said, the body-worn camera footage has now replaced handwritten notes, and defendants do get access to video evidence.

With the technology being so new, Rutledge said defense attorneys are still waiting for a criminal case that would be a good test on appeal. Civil litigation spearheaded by a group like the ACLU could also be a path for a legal challenge, he said.

“The law moves a lot slower than the real world,” Rutledge said. “If we’re going to start using this really novel piece of technology, I think we need to put some bumpers on that and figure out how do we not let this run off the rails?”