Rewrite report writing with Draft One
Draft One enables officers to get a head start on report writing by using artificial intelligence (AI) to draft a report narrative using the officer’s body-worn camera audio. After reviewing, editing and signing off on their reports, officers can submit the paperwork into Axon Records or into their third-party RMS for the next step of human review with their supervisors.
With Draft One, we’ve found agencies can save each officer an hour of paperwork each shift — with many experiencing larger time savings — enabling departments to expand their capabilities without adding additional staff. Additionally, with Draft One supporting the initial drafting of report narratives, reports submitted by agencies and shared out to prosecutors and defense attorneys are more standardized, clear and detailed, helping to support a more efficient judicial process.
Of course, any new product feature is bound to raise questions, especially one that utilizes advanced AI models. So, let’s dive into some of the questions community members and officers alike have asked about Draft One.
How does Draft One work exactly?
Today, most law enforcement agencies in the United States outfit their officers with body-worn cameras to record interactions with the public. These recordings contain a ton of dialogue, from officers asking questions to community members making statements. Body-worn camera audio is therefore filled with information about what transpired during a given incident.
With Draft One, the Axon body-worn camera audio is uploaded to the cloud and auto-transcribed, and the audio from that recording is used to generate a draft report narrative in seconds. No action is needed by the user to prep the audio file or convert evidence, and officers can generate their report draft within five minutes after they finish recording an incident.
Are reports automatically written and submitted?
Axon takes an “officer-in-the-loop” approach to AI. Draft One generates report narratives based on body-worn camera audio, but these narratives cannot be submitted without officer review, editing and approval.
[Insert] statements are a proofreading safeguard and a way to mitigate hallucinations, as we explicitly instruct the model to use [inserts] whenever it believes details are needed but doesn’t know what they are, such as the height of a suspect or visual observations about a scene. Once those [insert] statements have been completed, the officer must review and sign off on the narrative’s accuracy before submission. This workflow saves officers significant time while still ensuring that each report is reviewed for accuracy and key contextual information.
It’s important to note that the use of Draft One is not the last element in the report writing process for law enforcement. Once the report is submitted by the officer it routes to supervisors, report clerks and staff for further review and approval to ensure accuracy and agency accountability. The use of Draft One in this process is also denoted in the report's digital audit trail.
How do you ensure proofreading?
Each report includes several [insert] statements. Officers must manually fill in these blanks and provide key information before they can copy the text or submit the report.
Additionally, agencies can limit the types of reports where officers may use Draft One. By default, the Draft One experience restricts functionality to minor incident types and charge levels, however the agency has control over this feature.
How does Draft One use AI?
In order to generate a report narrative draft from body-worn camera audio files, Draft One analyzes the transcript from the camera and then summarizes all of the dialogue in the form of a police narrative report.
The details pulled by these algorithms into Draft One report narratives are “straight from the source.” In other words, the data that Axon’s AI models use to draft report narratives is pulled directly from the video transcript (although the process is more streamlined for body-worn cameras, officers can use Draft One to analyze any piece of video evidence with a transcript). If any details do not exist in the transcript, they are left out of the report and noted so an officer can go back and manually insert those details as needed.
AI models from OpenAI are used to develop Draft One transcriptions. 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.
How was Draft One tested for fairness?
Axon's product development is driven by responsible innovation, grounded in a set of guiding principles in key areas to ensure that everything we do serves as a force for good. Axon recognizes the immense promise of ethical AI innovation and aims to harness cutting-edge AI technology to revolutionize public safety, all the while prioritizing the rigorous mitigation of biases and other potential risks. This includes building tools that preserve the crucial role of human decision-making with specific controls that keep officers in-the-loop, while significantly improving efficiency and efficacy.
As with all Axon products and product features that utilize AI, Draft One went through a rigorous development process to reduce inherent bias in the models. Draft One was created with direct feedback from our Ethics and Equity Advisory Council, and studies examining quality and bias demonstrated that Draft One produces high-quality report narratives. Learn more about the study examining quality and bias in Draft One.
How secure is Draft One?
With Draft One, Axon maintains our high standards for security and privacy protection, including aligning with industry best practices around data collection and governance for AI development. Data used in Draft One report narratives is never shared with public AI databases like ChatGPT or Axon’s cloud provider Microsoft.
As with all products and product features of the Axon Ecosystem, all data used in Draft One report narratives is secured within the Axon Network, and no information is shared or viewed outside of a given agency unless that agency chooses to do so.
Will my courts allow me to use Draft One?
Reports are not generally submitted as direct evidence but are often used as a method to refresh the recollection of a testifying police officer. The body-worn camera footage, along with other evidence, is also available to verify for accuracy. While it’s true that every jurisdiction needs to define their own policies when it comes to the use of any public safety technology, there is legal precedent for officers signing off on reports they did not pen that are court-ready. Today, many officers call into phone lines to complete reports, then sign off on the accuracy of those reports before submitting. Additionally, many other officers leverage report templates that are pre-written, and simply fill in the relevant details. Draft One is simply the next step in the evolution of assisting report writing to give officers more time back to serve their communities.
We’ve met with a number of attorneys and their feedback has helped guide our safeguards and ensure the final report is both accurate and high quality. To learn more about how prosecutors and district attorneys are thinking about Draft One, checkout this webinar. We have found that transparency with attorneys and other key stakeholders is key to successful deployments of Draft One, and even provide default footer message templates to make this easy.
With many law enforcement agencies across the country facing staffing shortages and budget cuts, it is critical that agencies adopt technology solutions that can force multiply the abilities of their existing officers while reducing officer burnout. Draft One provides a responsibly-designed, practical solution to one of the most common problems experienced by law enforcement officers today: piles of paperwork that keep officers behind their desks rather than out in their communities. Draft One rewrites report writing to keep officers in the field and keep communities safe.
To learn more about rewriting report writing at your agency, contact your Axon representative or visit axon.com/draftone
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