NATIONAL — As police departments across the United States increasingly adopt AI-powered systems to generate police reports, the American Civil Liberties Union is warning that the technology may undermine accuracy and create broader civil liberties concerns rather than improve efficiency.
In a recently published statement, the ACLU reiterated its previously stated position that AI police report products do not actually reflect greater efficiency and may instead worsen performance.
In a 2024 white paper study, the ACLU questioned “the degree to which the technology even offers advantages for police officers and departments,” finding that “AI police report products didn’t actually save officers any time.” Rather, departments using AI encountered limitations, including conflicts with audio in loud environments, as well as complications involving prolonged interviews, pursuits and traffic incidents.
The ACLU further stated that since its research was published, several additional projects have produced “evidence that this technology’s benefits may be illusory.” The report referenced another study in which researchers assessed the effectiveness of AI-assisted police reports.
In that study, 92 senior law enforcement officers were asked to determine which reports had been written using AI in an effort to identify inconsistencies in quality. However, none of the officers could reliably distinguish between the reports, with the ACLU describing the results as “no better than a coin flip.” While acknowledging that AI generated stronger writing quality, the ACLU also claimed the technology reduced readability because of its use of longer words.
Despite subjective measures from officers showing “no reliable improvement,” the ACLU emphasized findings indicating that “AI reports were rated substantively and significantly worse on ACCURACY (p = .038).” The report specifically noted, “The estimated effect moves a report from roughly the 50th to the 36th percentile on perceived accuracy.”
The ACLU argued that accuracy is essential in criminal legal proceedings, particularly “when there are prosecutors deciding to charge, defense attorneys probing for inconsistencies, and judges and juries reconstructing events months later.”
“What worries me is that because of their access to minute data from body camera transcripts, AI-assisted reports may provide more detail than the average human and, with its trained-to-be authoritative AI voice, create reports that could seem superior to what humans produce,” the ACLU stated.
However, the organization also maintained that police officers themselves “seem to recognize that in terms of accuracy and usefulness, the AI is a step backwards, not forward.”
Despite the growing popularity of AI-powered reporting systems among law enforcement agencies, the ACLU said it believes that concerns over civil liberties and the findings reflected in officer assessments outweigh the technology’s marketing appeal.
The report further noted that “to the extent that people think AI saves time that it doesn’t actually save [this] seems to be a trend in the research that has emerged so far.” The ACLU added that “if the quality is lower, and it takes more time, and it raises insurmountable civil liberties issues,” the justification for adopting the technology becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
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