Im Leaving the United States. I worked and lived in the Carribean for three years. It was real freedom. Sure a lil dangerous if you're an idiot, a little longer wait times for things, bad roads, island time whatever. But there certainly wasnt a police state.
While there is a degree of lawlessness, but there were times I would see cops come to a bar after getting a call about someone being too drunk, and theyd drive their car home for them and get them home safe. The older Americans there would tell me it was like how it used to be in the USA in the 70s
I miss it, I dont want to live in a technocratic police state. I dont want to worry about a white van pulling up in front of my house because I said something sarcastic online.
Edit: On second thought, I feel far more unsafe in the major US city I live in than I ever did in the Carribean, not even comparable. So theres that too.
‘In passing by the side of Mount Thai, Confucius came on a woman who was weeping bitterly by a grave. The Master pressed forward and drove quickly to her; then he sent Tze-lu to question her. “Your wailing,” said he, “is that of one who has suffered sorrow on sorrow.”She replied, “That is so. Once my husband’s father was killed here by a tiger. My husband was also killed, and now my son has died in the same way.” The Master said, “Why do you not leave the place?” The answer was, “There is no oppressive government here.” The Master then said, “Remember this, my children: oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.”’
The subject of this paper is the problem of ensuring that government shall be less terrible than tigers.
--- From The Taming of Power by Bertrand Russell, 1938
Yes? They stayed and did not leave. Confucius asking the woman did not create that option. It was always there.
My personal thought would also be that one has significantly higher chances to succeed against a tiger than a government, including much more control over whether a tiger attacks in the first place (for example, fences or not going out alone would already improve your chances significantly, which would do nothing against government officials).
I don't doubt that. But the story just demonstrates survivor bias, literally. Surely there's a better way to illustrate the point. As it is the obvious fallacy makes me inherently skeptical of a conclusion that I'm otherwise inclined to agree with.
> I dont want to live in a technocratic police state
Unfortunately the police state mentality is spreading.
The attacks on encryption and the "need" to crackdown on terrorism and CP gives wet dreams to a lot of government officials who won't be satisfied until there is a camera in every home and your phone snooping on you 24/7 and reporting back to the cops all your crimes alleged or otherwise.
No government is immune. France, Australia, the UK, The EU, they are all coming for our privacy and freedom of speech and they will get them sooner or later.
They say history does not repeat but it often rhymes. I think a lot of people have forgotten/never experienced what it's like to live in a police state and the 2030s may just bring back these memories for some and potentially introduce these concepts to a new generation entirely.
Come on over to the Dominican Republic. I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve had no problems running several projects from here. In the Cibao region you’ll find IMHO the best culture, and Santiago has a little of everything, though it takes some looking to find the gems. I prefer the mountains between Santiago and Puerto Plata, close to everything but not in the middle of anything. Above 1000m elevation the weather is cool nights, warm days.
If you get here HMU if you want to talk about the third industrial revolution and what we’re working on to make it a better ride for humans.
I spent a month there working for a client at "caso de campo". I really enjoyed the month. What was weird, I stayed at a town outside (I'm not elite enough to stay at caso de campo :P) forget the name but the whole town was just filled with Italian expats. It has been on my list of potential places.
However, the one thing I didn't like though was all Haitian workers, I actually witnessed some pretty awful stuff (like literal bloody fights over water bottles) inside caso de campo where they virtually had Haitian slaves. I'm talking guys standing behind me at dinner waiting to refill my water, and that was their entire existence. Probably better than living Haiti, but it made me feel uncomfortable. Not sure if the rest of the DR is like that though, I didn't really leave that area.
> I dont want to worry about a white van pulling up in front of my house because I said something sarcastic online.
I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening, and then openly prefer a place they describe as “a lil dangerous” and “a degree of lawlessness”
This is the kind of thinking that happens when you build your entire worldview around exaggerated headlines and online fear mongering. When you go somewhere that isn’t in the headlines all of the time, you have to build your worldview around what you see and the vibes you sense instead of the fear mongering headlines. When a place described with words like dangerous and lawless starts to sound like the safer alternative than a country that is demonstrably safer, you’re probably getting too much of your information from internet sources designed to trigger your senses of fear and rage for engagement.
Every time there’s an anecdote with cognitive dissonance like this (describing the lawless, “lil dangerous” place as feeling safer) it comes down to getting perceptions of one community through vibes and the other community through news headlines. In this case, the description of the US as a technocratic police state where people get thrown into a white van for sarcastic online comments versus seeing some cops at a local bar one time.
> I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening
Oh, but it is. Lots of people are getting picked up for online speech, the government is letting "their guys" off the hook for open crimes, and it's escalating to talking openly about imprisoning the other party.
We're there, it's fascism happening openly, and America isn't what it never was anyways.
Ive been a resident of two countries and am a citzen of the USA. 2 years Norway. 3 years Bahamas. Along with a lot of work in Europe and Asia. So Ive witnessed a wide spectrum of governments, and have been detained by all of these governments at some point for reasons Im not going to speak on.
Maybe its because im a citizen of the USA and they have the ultimate power over me, but i felt the most terrified when under their custody. Hell in the Bahamas the officials took me to Burger King (in handcuffs lol). To be clear im not a criminal I just have a wierd line of work that people question.
I also have spent 6 months in a USA jail for what ultimately resulted in my pleading to a misdemeanor, and never was a crime. My world view is likely a lot different than yours, and the white vans do exist. They are here RIGHT NOW.
I think your mistake is believing that the development of infrastructure for one purpose will be cleanly stopped at a well-demarcated point once the original purpose is served.
When you build the infrastructure for squads of goons to kidnap people, then pour gasoline on the fire by massively increasing their funding, suddenly, a whole lot more people become “deportable.”
We have the government revoking visas for writing articles critical of Israel, and we have white vans grabbing people who the administration alleged no longer have valid visas. This is all happening right now.
I was jailed on a bullsh*t "hate speech" statute, because I said the f slur to a cop (who turned out to be gay, my PI proved this wasn't even true in my civil suit, but that didn't matter, they stuck me with this, along with some other cop related bs (said I coughed on him and tried to give him covid, assault on a police officer) This was the government trying to ruin my life because I hurt a cops feelings. You clearly haven't dealt with authorities much.
In my state there is no intent required, so if a word can have multiple meanings in different contexts, the government gets to decide how you intended to use that word and what meaning you meant. So sorry, you're so wrong. There isn't much difference from what i said to this very annoying cop, and what a lot of people say online. Also, this never would have happened if I had said it to a regular person and not a cop.
edit: So yes, I literally was jailed and forced to admit to a hate speech crime (alford plea) because of something I said to a cop. And you think this is all in my head??
I am manifestly certain it won't happen to me. I tick just about every box: straight, white, male, native-born US, healthy, moderately well off.
But I see it happening to others and that makes me upset. And my intention to fight that might some day make me a target, but that's not the core of it. The core is that it shouldn't happen to anyone.
tbh its wild you assumed my world view was curated by headlines. You probably have had the softest, easiest life and have never put your neck on the line in a way that might result in you being locked in a cage by a government official, so you welcome the white vans, because you don't take enough risk in life for it to ever matter to you.
Wild, and offensive. How do you like it when people make assumptions about you?
> tbh its wild you assumed my world view was curated by headlines. You probably have had the softest, easiest life and have never put your neck on the line
Ironic to make a comment about making assumptions and then go on to make some wild ad hominem assumptions.
The news headlines I was referring to was the article we’re in the comment section discussing.
> I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening
I mean, the "white van pulling up in front of a house" is happening on the daily now [1], the current administration has claimed they can suspend habeus corpus [2], they pick up US citizens and legal immigrants in these things [3], and they allegedly deny entry because of political reasons the administration doesn't like [4] (+allegedly [5]).
I don't think the fear of getting disappeared by an administration is unfounded, nor do I think we need to see documented evidence of exactly that particular circumstance happening before we're allowed to worry about it.
I also think the "lil dangerous" part is ironic, given most of these "other" places aren't particularly dangerous, nor is the US particularly safe as-is. "lil dangerous" and "degree of lawlessness" are apt descriptions of the United States, and has been for my entire lifetime.
I agree with everything that you said but it's a "better the devil you know" type of situation.
The vibe that many people have in the US is that things are constantly in flux and that we have less and less control over our lives and environments. Anything could happen.
Considering that, I could understand wanting to go somewhere where there's a known quantity of danger and a known set of rules for avoiding it.
The current state of the US is not that the secret police would come dissapear you for being sarcastic online, but the un-secret heavily-armed SWAT police could certainly show up if your sarcasm pissed off the wrong person.
That ain't great.
Do you feel like the trend of policing in the US is going in the direction of:
1) less heavily harmed, more accountable, more community-involved personal treatment
or
2) more heavily armed, anonymous, opaque large bureaucracies answering only to distant executives?
And which of those directions does the product in the linked article point?
I mean, the president did just threaten to (somehow) revoke the citizenship of a celebrity who disagreed with him online. Based on what we've seen already, what's to stop them from dubiously claiming to have revoked someone's (natural born) citizenship and then deport them to somewhere before anyone has time to argue anything before a judge?
There was a time I would have agreed with you, but now it doesn't seem that implausible anymore.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted so hard, it's a good point.
I'm not thrilled with where we are and I'm very cautious, but as a Black man in America the net difference in my fear and concern over my own government/police right now, as opposed to e.g. during Biden or Obama, isn't huge.
>I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening
Trump very recently suggested he would revoke Rosie O'Donnell's US citizenship, a natural born US citizen, because of things she's said that's (rightly) critical of him. I have no doubt he will try to do it, and SCOTUS probably won't stop him. This is political retaliation, and it's absolutely abhorrent.
That's where we are. I have no doubt the "white vans" are coming for people who speak out against the tyranny this administration is foisting upon us. I have no doubt that this very comment may even be used against me someday, as ridiculous as that may sound to you right now.
Law enforcement needs greater accountability altogether.
I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.
It’s astonishing that police officers aren’t held to the same standards as the rest of us. As a carpenter and building contractor, if I showed up at the wrong address and built or tore down something by mistake, I’d be financially and legally responsible. I’d be expected to make it right, and my insurance would likely step in.
But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.
> But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.
The American public, or at least the set of them whose vote counts among the gerrymandering, have explicitly chosen this. Their representatives are now building an even less accountable system to be used against "immigrants", i.e. anyone non-white, who can be abducted and denied legal representation.
That’s a dangerous slippery slope. Most public officers (employees) are subject to a wide range of ethics and other regulations that impact post-service employment. In exchange, you’re indemnified for official acts and the government has a duty to defend you.
I’ve served in policy making roles at different levels of government. There’s a variety of businesses post employment that I’m not permitted to enter in post employment, some for 2-5 years, some indefinitely. Those restrictions are taken seriously, and I know that I’ll be held accountable.
Putting the onus on the employee is really enabling bad behavior - the issue is the poor governance of the police, and using the courts as some sort of cudgel won’t fix it, it will just create more corruption as the powers that be will hang out patsies to take the fall.
If the police are allowed to operate paramilitary forces, they need paramilitary discipline and rules of engagement. Army soldiers breaking rules of engagement get punished and officers sidelined and pushed out of the service. Police in many cases have been allowed to create cultures where everyone scratches each others back. Many police are veterans, and many privately will comment on the differences between those experiences.
IMO, the way to address the issues you describe is standard separation of duties. Invest in state and regional police forces, disempower local police, and move enforcement and investigation of police to a chain of command removed from the police. (Perhaps a State AG) When you need to blunt the variance associated with people’s poor application of discretion, the answer is usually a bureaucratic process.
The difficulty with enforcing via AGs is that prosecutors feel the need to have a good relationship with the police for their other cases. You need an office who isn't going to be working with local and state cops at all, maybe a federal body?
Attorneys General are usually not states or district attorneys. That may vary by state — I’m not an expert in this… iv lived in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, where the role doesn’t include that so my perspective.
Point being, as much separation as possible from the police (or any) chain of command is essential. The Federal government successfully used independent agencies until the circus that came to town with Trump part 2 appeared.
> I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.
And it'd be administered by some faceless bureaucracy full of accountants, rather than a couple local politicians that the union can just bully (or bribe or whatever) into ignoring things.
But of course the current mess derives from sovereign immunity, which might be a bit tricky to get the politicians to tinker with more than they already have. :(
IMO Chesterton'ing the state of policing in the US results in deep fundamental awkwardness.
Why are police heavily armed and adopting military tactics?
Because of famous encounters with heavily-armed criminals by lightly-equipped cops.
Why are criminals able to be so heavily armed?
Because of treating a "right to bear arms" as semi-sacred. Supposedly in the name of distrust of government.
A heavily-armed citizenry doesn't have to lead to fascism but it can certainly give people great excuses to enable it... (See also how it allows the existence of armed private militias who will talk about "standing by" to assist with certain government actions.)
Qualified immunity is a relatively modern invention by the Supreme Court. The origins were fairly reasonable in the civil rights era, saying in Pierson v. Ray that some Mississippi police officers were not liable for enforcing a state law against assembly which was later ruled to be unconstitutional, which is probably the strongest case for a positive effect.
The negatives started mounting as it was rapidly expanded from the question of whether the action was legal at the time as in the Mississippi case to whether the officer violated clearly-established precedent for the specific actions they made. There really isn’t a positive argument for that better than “the courts invented a doctrine because Congress didn’t set a clean policy”. Because it ties into some hot-button political issues now, we’re unlikely to see improvements for a while but it is interesting to contemplate the alternate timeline where the Markey/Booker/Harris resolution in 2020 actually turned into a law.
Is your question what’s the positive effect of an unaccountable and violent police force? In general the effect is continued terrorization of poor and black and brown communities and the entrenchment of the police’s municipal power. This is a “positive” effect only to the worst people who want a hierarchical society where they get to be on top by force.
> But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional.
It's not just that there's rarely accountability - there's explicitly no accountability.
People have sued officers, police departments, cities for the cost of damages from such mistaken raids (including ones that were completely negligent, like wrong street entirely) and the courts have explicitly ruled that they have zero reponsibility to pay for any of the damage caused.
I really wish policing would take more inspiration from aviation on a different avenue for police accountability.
The NTSB exists not to blame pilots (though they sometimes do), but to make air travel safer and prevent future plane crashes. In the business of preventing disaster in safety-critical industry, if you chalk something up to human error or call it a tragic accident, you guarantee that it will happen again. Finding that everyone did everything by the book means the book needs to be rewritten because the book that exists today contains a recipe for plane crashes.
I wish police would treat use of force incidents the same way. The investigations after police use of force ask whether the officer violated the law or department policy. Like most law enforcement and judicial work, the exercise focuses on identifying, trying, and punishing guilty parties. If there is no guilty party, the process can produce no change. I would like to see more investigations into police use of force that focus on improving safety outcomes instead.
That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it.
The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.
Here's the thing. I've read thousands of police reports. Most police reports are super short and super vague. Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Most criminal charges result in plea deals. Most defendants will never see any evidence against them before pleading guilty†.
If, in the exceptionally rare case that a defendant goes to trial, an officer has to testify, it is probably on average a year after he wrote the report. He will be sat down just before trial by the prosecutor and shown his report and asked to read it. On the stand he generally will not have his report available to reference and is supposed to use his memory, but this will be corrupted by his reading of whatever is in the report he read a couple of hours before. If his report is full of inaccuracies he will almost certainly testify under oath to those.
†This situation has changed very slightly in the last few years with lawyers now supposed to verify the probable guilt of their client before recommending a guilty plea.
What about less? Take away guns and reach of the cops and politicians?
Accountability by making 900k cops across all levels of government stripped of power and made normal people? Same for the 600k politicians coast to coast. Screw their story mode mental illness.
Make everyone busy generalizing logistics process to serve biology and stop with story mode hustling memes about fiat (vacuous proclamations) valuations using jargon from the 1800s?
Roughly 1.5 million pols and cops have 10s of millions wrapped around their finger. With urbanization the best part is a bunch of them live just a few miles from any given large urban area full of people being screwed by them.
The time for demanding meager reforms from 60+ year olds who have no skin in our future is long gone.
Except the low level gossipy kind like “so n so cheated”. Statistical analysis of death trends suggest we kill each other on Main Street over such gossip at the same rate humans did centuries ago. It’s those moments of nation state fueled atrocity and imperialism when human death spikes. Seem clear in the streets most adults just don’t go on murderous rampage.
A lot of people worry about a Terminator style AI apocalypse. I don’t.
I worry that we’ve already created the AI apocalypse and that this is what it looks like, along with extremist magnification on social media.
I trust AI to be what is is- essentially a lot of math that classisfies and predicts stuff, usually words, that the prediction can be used generatively, and the classification stuff can be used to identify stuff in various media.
What I don’t trust is that people will use it responsibly. Hell, I don’t, when I’m vibe coding, but that’s on me.
People are venal and self absorbed and busy and lazy and all the other traits that lead to not using AI responsibly. And businesses are amoral (not immoral) and want the shortest path to revenue, with the least friction.
So of course police officers who want to be on patrol and did not sign up to spend countless hours on reports, are going to let the AI write it and call it good without proofreading.
We could pass a lot of laws trying to specify products that force police to act reliably, or we could maybe just pass a law that says that AI cannot be used to write police reports, but that clearly labeled AI generated transcriptions and summaries may be attached unedited to police reports, if and only if the original recordings are also preserved as evidence.
And police departments that keep body camera and car camera footage might be ease up on the report writing and only require officers to annotate it with their impressions, but otherwise let the record speak for itself.
> So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices
You have to wonder if this will stand up in court. I hope not.
AI has a great opportunity to take processes that contain hidden bias and make them more legible and therefore amenable to fixing.
But it also has the opportunity to do the opposite, and we should be cautious to make sure guardrails are in place when putting this tech into life-and-death systems.
“Stamp this LLM text in a hurry” is an invitation for whatever errors and biases are baked into the system to be propagated. You need provenance and measurement of LLM outputs.
Creative lawyers will be all over this. First you get the officer to testify that AI helped write the report, then you call the AI as a witness. When the judge tosses that, you start issuing subpoenas to everyone you can find at OpenAI and Axon.
As others point out, the actual bodycam footage will be definitively probative for the events it records. But there are plenty of cases where the report itself leads to later actions that may be tortious or criminal, and finding out who's to blame for the exact wording used is highly relevant.
Example: AI incorrectly reports that during A's arrest, A made incriminating allegations about B. Based on the report, the police get a warrant and search B's house. When it turns out B is innocent, B sues the department, and when the report turns up during discovery, we're off to the circus.
I wondering how much this even matters in the age of everything being recorded.
If they are using axon body cameras and vehicle cameras, then usually the entire interaction is recorded, often from multiple officers.
I cannot imagine a defense so incompetent that they rely on the police report rather than watching the entire body cam footage and doing their own assessment.
Even if the cops are doing something sketchy (like turning off their camera) then it's not like the police report would be any more trustworthy.
The current administration has already removed the requirement for federal police forces to wear body cameras. As well as made statements (but little action so far) to federalize the police force to be under the jurisdiction of the DOJ. Everything being recorded may not be the case very soon.
Sorry, I’d get sources but I just woke up, I’ll edit this later with them.
I mean, already at the local cop level "forgetting" to turn the body cam on or only releasing the video (at least, quickly) if it puts the officer in a positive light seems to be the norm
“You are a helpful agent. Police officers will describe an interaction to you and you will write a report that highlights the appropriateness of the officer’s actions, omitting anything that might indicate they acted improperly”
Even in jurisdictions that require recordings at all times, there are times when the police are required by law to switch them off (entering certain non-public spaces etc), so there can always be gaps that are legal, never mind illegal.
I was thinking the same thing. If the AI report depends on the raw audio, then it should be preserved and the defense should compare that to the final police report. Having the edit history would be useful for improving the software and analyzing the officer's motivations, but ultimately we're not in a worse situation than before.
I'd predict the synthesis of the AI transcript and the police officer's memory will be more accurate than just the police officer alone. Would be nice if there's an independent study.
There are very incompetent public defenders, if we attribute to incompetence instead of malice, AI isn't changing that.
It goes a lot deeper than this, the real world isn't as simple as 'objective truth' and much of the law relies on interpreting the facts we all seek. This is where this technology fails, it normalizes nudging the margins to include a framing of what happened (including that video) using particular and precise language. That language influences court decisions.
For example, the phrase 'furtive movements' seems really anochronistic. Is that a phrase you use? cops use in their day to day life? But it constantly shows up in police reports. Why? The courts have said that 'furtive' movements are suspicious enough to trigger probable cause - which justifies a search. So now, cops every where write that they observe movements that are furtive. Is what your attorney viewed furtive? where they normal movements? were they suspicious? The cop described them as furtive though and we defer to cops, in part because they speak the language of the courts, and now your arrest is valid and that search is valid and whatever is recovered is valid - because a court said movements need to be furtive and you sneezed and a cop described that as furtive even though he had already decided to do the search before he got out of his car.
The only way our system works is if at every level every participant (people, jurors, judges, politicians) distrust the words of police - especially when they habitually use the language of the law to justify their actions. What this tool does is quite the opposite, it will statistically normalize the words police use to describe every interaction in language that is meant to persuade and influence courts now and over time to defer to police.
It should matter which parts were written by AI or by officer. Once the officer signs off on the report, they take full responsibility for the content.
I can only assume you meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "should", but if you study human factors you'll discover that certain kinds of taking-shortcuts behavior are inevitable when dealing with humans. Speeding when we drive, for example. We know we are creating a material risk of getting pulled over and fined, but we just basically decide to ignore that risk because for most of us it is outweighed by the convenience (and real value) of getting everywhere we're going faster.
As always considering how a person would interact with an intern is surprisingly instructive to how they will form a working relationship with an non-sentient tool like a language model. You would expect them to give it a probationary experience to earn their trust after which if they are satisfied they will almost certainly express that trust by giving the tool a greater and greater degree of freedom with less active (and less critical) oversight.
It is not the initial state that worries me where the officers still mistrust a new technology and are vigilant of it. What worries me is the late-stage where they have learned to trust it (because it has learned to cover their asses correctly) and the AI itself actually ends up exercising power in human social structures because people have a surprising bias towards not speaking up when it would be safer to keep your head down and go with the flow, even when the flow is letting AI take operational control of society inch by inch
Do you think there is a difference between a civilian driver ignoring the routine maintenance schedule for their car and a professional pilot ignoring the maintenance schedule for their plane?
That’s absolutely their choice, then. But if it turns out the AI wrote bullshit into the report, the officer that rubber stamped it must be held accountable for that, with no difference to a situation where they had written the bullshit themselves.
This requires audio to work and appears to create more transparency. You can request the audio recording to verify accuracy. This will happen as a routine procedure from defense attorneys. Any problems with the technology would be discovered quickly and if the officer didn’t do their job of correcting the errors before the report is generated they would be torn apart.
From TFA, “ You can read our full report, which details what we found in those documents, how we filed those public records requests, and how you can file your own, here.” With the last word here being a link to another article:
Not correct. All FOIA laws that I know of say that any records created or held by private corporations under contract to the government are FOIA-able via the government. (the government has to go out and get the records for you)
Yep! Here's Illinois's statutory language on this topic:
(2) A public record that is not in the possession of a public body but is in the possession of a party with whom the agency has contracted to perform a governmental function on behalf of the public body, and that directly relates to the governmental function and is not otherwise exempt under this Act, shall be considered a public record of the public body, for purposes of this Act.
The nuance is in the definitional limitations/vagueness of "directly relates to the governmental function".
> sign an acknowledgement that the report was generated using Draft One and that they have reviewed the report and made necessary edits to ensure it is consistent with the officer’s recollection.
We already know that police officers are not more reliable than the general public as eye witnesses and that eye witness reports are generally very unreliable as they are very susceptible to prompting bias. This seems like leaning in to prompt bias. The AI is now prompting the human rather than the other way around. This is perverse.
I was watching one of those youtube bodycam videos of an accident scene where one of the cars ended up in a gas station. Police show up and it's chaos -- victims on the ground needing medical attention, witnesses helping (or not) said accident victims, police not knowing who was in what car, &etc.
In the midst of all this (when it calmed down enough for the police to get a handle on the scene) they tried to identify someone who didn't want to be involved and promptly cuffed them and threw them in the back of a squad car for "being uncooperative". One of the other witnesses, having seen this, decided that person was the missing driver of the other car and told this to the police with all sorts of confidence.
Now the police have a 'suspect' to concentrate on because anyone 'acting squirrelly' must have something to hide as it's totally inconceivable to them someone might just not want to participate in their investigation. Luckily this poor, traumatized kid was able to 'prove' they weren't involved before spending who knows how much time behind bars based on 'credible' eye-witness testimony.
These audio-only AI generated reports should be all kinds of accurate now that police are trained to say 'quit resisting' anytime there's any level of force involved specifically for the body cams...
I think such a tool could be useful for ensuring all the facts get included, but I hate the idea that some departments could start highering illiterate officers if this tech goes far enough.
I've read thousands of police reports. I would say this is true about their literacy, and their typing skills are equally horrible. They also generally really hate writing reports (which are almost universally never read) and tend to make them as short as possible.
never have been in Alabama, and i find that super interesting.
how does anyone end up borderline illiterate in the US for the last several decades? can kids drop out without passing reading, like drop out as grade schoolers?
When EU introduced its AI Act there was much gnashing of teeth here at HN over "stifling of innovation" and "getting left behind in technological backwater".
EU AI Act specifically calls out and forbids such applications. Of course, the state will do what the state will do, but there's an actual obstacle enshrined in law.
And there is the right to privacy enshrined as well but that has no bearing on what states will do ultimately.
The EU is in the midst of ending encryption and will soon require lawful access to all your data by forcing providers to bake in legal backdoors in OSes so that nobody can bypass/deactivate them.
All of this done under the guise of protecting the children, stopping misinformation(the ministry of truth is back) and protect democracy (TM).
The AI act may be a good thing in some cases but we should all stop pretending that the EU is not following in the footsteps of the US when it comes to loss of privacy and restriction of freedom of speech.
Many western countries are slowly sliding into wannabe authoritarian regimes.
Having picked a habit of watching propable cause proceedings on YouTube, I wonder if this is simply result of real reports that AI was trained on being purposefully obtuse and laconic to give prosecutors a wiggle space in the court room?
The prosecutors are given the most absolute trash reports to work with. "Failure to ID, after a traffic stop." "What was the stop for?" "It doesn't say." "So no PC for the stop."
"A caller and said she thought someone was stealing their neighbor's U Haul. A man was observed walking on that street and taken into custody for ..." "For what? Walking while black?"
But no sympathy for the prosecutors either. Garbage reports, but they obviously don't read them pre-hearing, and have plainly become accustomed to judges rubber stamping their PC hearings.
I do like that he doesn't go 'lightly' with the defendants. "You got off lucky this time. You know it, I know it. Do better or it might not go the same next time", and when there is PC or other such, he doesn't put up with any bullshit either.
His patronizing tone to the defendants is the one thing I can’t stand about him. Telling some kid who did nothing wrong and was pulled over for no reason “be careful” is bs. What else should the kid do? They already were doing nothing wrong.
What Axon's product should be: Define "best" police report, and assist the officer to write that.
What it is: Axon makes whatever police departments ask for.
It doesn't have to be a big conspiracy. It's not incompetence either. Hanlon's Razer should really be, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by" the enterprise sales pipeline.
Enterprise sales is why we are talking about Axon and not far older, detailed, thoughtful efforts from all sorts of other organizations.
our officers don’t have time to comb through every transcript, fixing it for privacy, empathy, and all that. But keeping the transcripts is still a big win: more info in police records can make police officers more data-driven :)
Im Leaving the United States. I worked and lived in the Carribean for three years. It was real freedom. Sure a lil dangerous if you're an idiot, a little longer wait times for things, bad roads, island time whatever. But there certainly wasnt a police state.
While there is a degree of lawlessness, but there were times I would see cops come to a bar after getting a call about someone being too drunk, and theyd drive their car home for them and get them home safe. The older Americans there would tell me it was like how it used to be in the USA in the 70s
I miss it, I dont want to live in a technocratic police state. I dont want to worry about a white van pulling up in front of my house because I said something sarcastic online.
Edit: On second thought, I feel far more unsafe in the major US city I live in than I ever did in the Carribean, not even comparable. So theres that too.
‘In passing by the side of Mount Thai, Confucius came on a woman who was weeping bitterly by a grave. The Master pressed forward and drove quickly to her; then he sent Tze-lu to question her. “Your wailing,” said he, “is that of one who has suffered sorrow on sorrow.”She replied, “That is so. Once my husband’s father was killed here by a tiger. My husband was also killed, and now my son has died in the same way.” The Master said, “Why do you not leave the place?” The answer was, “There is no oppressive government here.” The Master then said, “Remember this, my children: oppressive government is more terrible than tigers.”’
The subject of this paper is the problem of ensuring that government shall be less terrible than tigers.
--- From The Taming of Power by Bertrand Russell, 1938
I wonder if her husband, son, and father in law would agree with that conclusion.
Yes? They stayed and did not leave. Confucius asking the woman did not create that option. It was always there.
My personal thought would also be that one has significantly higher chances to succeed against a tiger than a government, including much more control over whether a tiger attacks in the first place (for example, fences or not going out alone would already improve your chances significantly, which would do nothing against government officials).
I don't doubt that. But the story just demonstrates survivor bias, literally. Surely there's a better way to illustrate the point. As it is the obvious fallacy makes me inherently skeptical of a conclusion that I'm otherwise inclined to agree with.
...and that was in 1938, when there was no such thing as an AI panopticon.
And the original “Tyranny is Fiercer than a Tiger” significantly predates even that!
It also came just before some particularly terrible governments really hit their stride.
TechDebtdevin says "...how it used to be in the USA in the 70s"
In regard to drinking and driving the 70s were same as now in my experience.
> I dont want to live in a technocratic police state
Unfortunately the police state mentality is spreading.
The attacks on encryption and the "need" to crackdown on terrorism and CP gives wet dreams to a lot of government officials who won't be satisfied until there is a camera in every home and your phone snooping on you 24/7 and reporting back to the cops all your crimes alleged or otherwise.
No government is immune. France, Australia, the UK, The EU, they are all coming for our privacy and freedom of speech and they will get them sooner or later.
They say history does not repeat but it often rhymes. I think a lot of people have forgotten/never experienced what it's like to live in a police state and the 2030s may just bring back these memories for some and potentially introduce these concepts to a new generation entirely.
Come on over to the Dominican Republic. I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve had no problems running several projects from here. In the Cibao region you’ll find IMHO the best culture, and Santiago has a little of everything, though it takes some looking to find the gems. I prefer the mountains between Santiago and Puerto Plata, close to everything but not in the middle of anything. Above 1000m elevation the weather is cool nights, warm days.
If you get here HMU if you want to talk about the third industrial revolution and what we’re working on to make it a better ride for humans.
I spent a month there working for a client at "caso de campo". I really enjoyed the month. What was weird, I stayed at a town outside (I'm not elite enough to stay at caso de campo :P) forget the name but the whole town was just filled with Italian expats. It has been on my list of potential places.
However, the one thing I didn't like though was all Haitian workers, I actually witnessed some pretty awful stuff (like literal bloody fights over water bottles) inside caso de campo where they virtually had Haitian slaves. I'm talking guys standing behind me at dinner waiting to refill my water, and that was their entire existence. Probably better than living Haiti, but it made me feel uncomfortable. Not sure if the rest of the DR is like that though, I didn't really leave that area.
> I dont want to worry about a white van pulling up in front of my house because I said something sarcastic online.
I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening, and then openly prefer a place they describe as “a lil dangerous” and “a degree of lawlessness”
This is the kind of thinking that happens when you build your entire worldview around exaggerated headlines and online fear mongering. When you go somewhere that isn’t in the headlines all of the time, you have to build your worldview around what you see and the vibes you sense instead of the fear mongering headlines. When a place described with words like dangerous and lawless starts to sound like the safer alternative than a country that is demonstrably safer, you’re probably getting too much of your information from internet sources designed to trigger your senses of fear and rage for engagement.
Every time there’s an anecdote with cognitive dissonance like this (describing the lawless, “lil dangerous” place as feeling safer) it comes down to getting perceptions of one community through vibes and the other community through news headlines. In this case, the description of the US as a technocratic police state where people get thrown into a white van for sarcastic online comments versus seeing some cops at a local bar one time.
> I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening
Oh, but it is. Lots of people are getting picked up for online speech, the government is letting "their guys" off the hook for open crimes, and it's escalating to talking openly about imprisoning the other party.
We're there, it's fascism happening openly, and America isn't what it never was anyways.
Ive been a resident of two countries and am a citzen of the USA. 2 years Norway. 3 years Bahamas. Along with a lot of work in Europe and Asia. So Ive witnessed a wide spectrum of governments, and have been detained by all of these governments at some point for reasons Im not going to speak on.
Maybe its because im a citizen of the USA and they have the ultimate power over me, but i felt the most terrified when under their custody. Hell in the Bahamas the officials took me to Burger King (in handcuffs lol). To be clear im not a criminal I just have a wierd line of work that people question.
I also have spent 6 months in a USA jail for what ultimately resulted in my pleading to a misdemeanor, and never was a crime. My world view is likely a lot different than yours, and the white vans do exist. They are here RIGHT NOW.
> and the white vans do exist. They are here RIGHT NOW.
The comment was that white vans would take them away for posting something sarcastic online
I think your mistake is believing that the development of infrastructure for one purpose will be cleanly stopped at a well-demarcated point once the original purpose is served.
When you build the infrastructure for squads of goons to kidnap people, then pour gasoline on the fire by massively increasing their funding, suddenly, a whole lot more people become “deportable.”
We have the government revoking visas for writing articles critical of Israel, and we have white vans grabbing people who the administration alleged no longer have valid visas. This is all happening right now.
I was jailed on a bullsh*t "hate speech" statute, because I said the f slur to a cop (who turned out to be gay, my PI proved this wasn't even true in my civil suit, but that didn't matter, they stuck me with this, along with some other cop related bs (said I coughed on him and tried to give him covid, assault on a police officer) This was the government trying to ruin my life because I hurt a cops feelings. You clearly haven't dealt with authorities much.
In my state there is no intent required, so if a word can have multiple meanings in different contexts, the government gets to decide how you intended to use that word and what meaning you meant. So sorry, you're so wrong. There isn't much difference from what i said to this very annoying cop, and what a lot of people say online. Also, this never would have happened if I had said it to a regular person and not a cop.
edit: So yes, I literally was jailed and forced to admit to a hate speech crime (alford plea) because of something I said to a cop. And you think this is all in my head??
Ah yes, the UK does this kind of thing with Section 5 Public Order act making it basically illegal to swear in front of cops.
Not quite the same thing as just saying something online, although the US has now developed special police for that. From the part of ""free speech"".
I am manifestly certain it won't happen to me. I tick just about every box: straight, white, male, native-born US, healthy, moderately well off.
But I see it happening to others and that makes me upset. And my intention to fight that might some day make me a target, but that's not the core of it. The core is that it shouldn't happen to anyone.
tbh its wild you assumed my world view was curated by headlines. You probably have had the softest, easiest life and have never put your neck on the line in a way that might result in you being locked in a cage by a government official, so you welcome the white vans, because you don't take enough risk in life for it to ever matter to you.
Wild, and offensive. How do you like it when people make assumptions about you?
> tbh its wild you assumed my world view was curated by headlines. You probably have had the softest, easiest life and have never put your neck on the line
Ironic to make a comment about making assumptions and then go on to make some wild ad hominem assumptions.
The news headlines I was referring to was the article we’re in the comment section discussing.
Get out of here with "ad hominem", you know what you were saying. Go back to less-wrong.
> I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening
I mean, the "white van pulling up in front of a house" is happening on the daily now [1], the current administration has claimed they can suspend habeus corpus [2], they pick up US citizens and legal immigrants in these things [3], and they allegedly deny entry because of political reasons the administration doesn't like [4] (+allegedly [5]).
I don't think the fear of getting disappeared by an administration is unfounded, nor do I think we need to see documented evidence of exactly that particular circumstance happening before we're allowed to worry about it.
I also think the "lil dangerous" part is ironic, given most of these "other" places aren't particularly dangerous, nor is the US particularly safe as-is. "lil dangerous" and "degree of lawlessness" are apt descriptions of the United States, and has been for my entire lifetime.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=masked+ice+raids&udm=2 [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-habeas-corpus-... [3] https://abc7chicago.com/post/george-retes-disabled-vet-us-ci... [4] https://apnews.com/article/immigration-detainees-students-oz... [5] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/18/australian-deported-o...
I agree with everything that you said but it's a "better the devil you know" type of situation.
The vibe that many people have in the US is that things are constantly in flux and that we have less and less control over our lives and environments. Anything could happen.
Considering that, I could understand wanting to go somewhere where there's a known quantity of danger and a known set of rules for avoiding it.
The current state of the US is not that the secret police would come dissapear you for being sarcastic online, but the un-secret heavily-armed SWAT police could certainly show up if your sarcasm pissed off the wrong person.
That ain't great.
Do you feel like the trend of policing in the US is going in the direction of:
1) less heavily harmed, more accountable, more community-involved personal treatment
or
2) more heavily armed, anonymous, opaque large bureaucracies answering only to distant executives?
And which of those directions does the product in the linked article point?
I mean, the president did just threaten to (somehow) revoke the citizenship of a celebrity who disagreed with him online. Based on what we've seen already, what's to stop them from dubiously claiming to have revoked someone's (natural born) citizenship and then deport them to somewhere before anyone has time to argue anything before a judge?
There was a time I would have agreed with you, but now it doesn't seem that implausible anymore.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted so hard, it's a good point.
I'm not thrilled with where we are and I'm very cautious, but as a Black man in America the net difference in my fear and concern over my own government/police right now, as opposed to e.g. during Biden or Obama, isn't huge.
>I find it fascinating that people will genuinely worry about this happening to them, despite it not happening
Trump very recently suggested he would revoke Rosie O'Donnell's US citizenship, a natural born US citizen, because of things she's said that's (rightly) critical of him. I have no doubt he will try to do it, and SCOTUS probably won't stop him. This is political retaliation, and it's absolutely abhorrent.
That's where we are. I have no doubt the "white vans" are coming for people who speak out against the tyranny this administration is foisting upon us. I have no doubt that this very comment may even be used against me someday, as ridiculous as that may sound to you right now.
While I don’t think you should be downvoted… brother, maybe the headlines aren’t being exaggerated.
The real issue is accountability - officers need to be held accountable for reports the way pilots are accountable for use of auto-pilot[1].
[1] yes they are: https://www.google.com/search?q=are+pilots+accountable+for+u...
Law enforcement needs greater accountability altogether.
I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.
It’s astonishing that police officers aren’t held to the same standards as the rest of us. As a carpenter and building contractor, if I showed up at the wrong address and built or tore down something by mistake, I’d be financially and legally responsible. I’d be expected to make it right, and my insurance would likely step in.
But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.
> But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional. That’s unacceptable in any system that claims to serve and protect the public.
The American public, or at least the set of them whose vote counts among the gerrymandering, have explicitly chosen this. Their representatives are now building an even less accountable system to be used against "immigrants", i.e. anyone non-white, who can be abducted and denied legal representation.
That’s a dangerous slippery slope. Most public officers (employees) are subject to a wide range of ethics and other regulations that impact post-service employment. In exchange, you’re indemnified for official acts and the government has a duty to defend you.
I’ve served in policy making roles at different levels of government. There’s a variety of businesses post employment that I’m not permitted to enter in post employment, some for 2-5 years, some indefinitely. Those restrictions are taken seriously, and I know that I’ll be held accountable.
Putting the onus on the employee is really enabling bad behavior - the issue is the poor governance of the police, and using the courts as some sort of cudgel won’t fix it, it will just create more corruption as the powers that be will hang out patsies to take the fall.
If the police are allowed to operate paramilitary forces, they need paramilitary discipline and rules of engagement. Army soldiers breaking rules of engagement get punished and officers sidelined and pushed out of the service. Police in many cases have been allowed to create cultures where everyone scratches each others back. Many police are veterans, and many privately will comment on the differences between those experiences.
IMO, the way to address the issues you describe is standard separation of duties. Invest in state and regional police forces, disempower local police, and move enforcement and investigation of police to a chain of command removed from the police. (Perhaps a State AG) When you need to blunt the variance associated with people’s poor application of discretion, the answer is usually a bureaucratic process.
The difficulty with enforcing via AGs is that prosecutors feel the need to have a good relationship with the police for their other cases. You need an office who isn't going to be working with local and state cops at all, maybe a federal body?
Attorneys General are usually not states or district attorneys. That may vary by state — I’m not an expert in this… iv lived in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, where the role doesn’t include that so my perspective.
Point being, as much separation as possible from the police (or any) chain of command is essential. The Federal government successfully used independent agencies until the circus that came to town with Trump part 2 appeared.
> I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.
And it'd be administered by some faceless bureaucracy full of accountants, rather than a couple local politicians that the union can just bully (or bribe or whatever) into ignoring things.
But of course the current mess derives from sovereign immunity, which might be a bit tricky to get the politicians to tinker with more than they already have. :(
> sovereign immunity
I think you mean qualified immunity in this context?
My understanding is that that's the result of the tinkering that's already been done to tone things down a bit.
Chesterton’s fence cones to mind. I wonder what unintended positive effects the current policy has.
IMO Chesterton'ing the state of policing in the US results in deep fundamental awkwardness.
Why are police heavily armed and adopting military tactics?
Because of famous encounters with heavily-armed criminals by lightly-equipped cops.
Why are criminals able to be so heavily armed?
Because of treating a "right to bear arms" as semi-sacred. Supposedly in the name of distrust of government.
A heavily-armed citizenry doesn't have to lead to fascism but it can certainly give people great excuses to enable it... (See also how it allows the existence of armed private militias who will talk about "standing by" to assist with certain government actions.)
Qualified immunity is a relatively modern invention by the Supreme Court. The origins were fairly reasonable in the civil rights era, saying in Pierson v. Ray that some Mississippi police officers were not liable for enforcing a state law against assembly which was later ruled to be unconstitutional, which is probably the strongest case for a positive effect.
The negatives started mounting as it was rapidly expanded from the question of whether the action was legal at the time as in the Mississippi case to whether the officer violated clearly-established precedent for the specific actions they made. There really isn’t a positive argument for that better than “the courts invented a doctrine because Congress didn’t set a clean policy”. Because it ties into some hot-button political issues now, we’re unlikely to see improvements for a while but it is interesting to contemplate the alternate timeline where the Markey/Booker/Harris resolution in 2020 actually turned into a law.
Is your question what’s the positive effect of an unaccountable and violent police force? In general the effect is continued terrorization of poor and black and brown communities and the entrenchment of the police’s municipal power. This is a “positive” effect only to the worst people who want a hierarchical society where they get to be on top by force.
Chesterton's fence, as properly applied, should have been considered when granting the immunity we see now.
e.g. I wonder what unintended (or perhaps intended) negative effects the current policy has compared to the previous one.
> But when a police officer raids the wrong home, injures or kills innocent people, or throws tear gas into a room with a baby, there’s rarely accountability—legal, financial, or professional.
It's not just that there's rarely accountability - there's explicitly no accountability.
People have sued officers, police departments, cities for the cost of damages from such mistaken raids (including ones that were completely negligent, like wrong street entirely) and the courts have explicitly ruled that they have zero reponsibility to pay for any of the damage caused.
Politically, you could probably sell the insurance idea as actually protecting officers. But then you'd get the wrong people opposing it...
I really wish policing would take more inspiration from aviation on a different avenue for police accountability.
The NTSB exists not to blame pilots (though they sometimes do), but to make air travel safer and prevent future plane crashes. In the business of preventing disaster in safety-critical industry, if you chalk something up to human error or call it a tragic accident, you guarantee that it will happen again. Finding that everyone did everything by the book means the book needs to be rewritten because the book that exists today contains a recipe for plane crashes.
I wish police would treat use of force incidents the same way. The investigations after police use of force ask whether the officer violated the law or department policy. Like most law enforcement and judicial work, the exercise focuses on identifying, trying, and punishing guilty parties. If there is no guilty party, the process can produce no change. I would like to see more investigations into police use of force that focus on improving safety outcomes instead.
That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it.
The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.
Here's the thing. I've read thousands of police reports. Most police reports are super short and super vague. Most police reports are never read even once, even though a large percentage result in convictions. Most criminal charges result in plea deals. Most defendants will never see any evidence against them before pleading guilty†.
If, in the exceptionally rare case that a defendant goes to trial, an officer has to testify, it is probably on average a year after he wrote the report. He will be sat down just before trial by the prosecutor and shown his report and asked to read it. On the stand he generally will not have his report available to reference and is supposed to use his memory, but this will be corrupted by his reading of whatever is in the report he read a couple of hours before. If his report is full of inaccuracies he will almost certainly testify under oath to those.
†This situation has changed very slightly in the last few years with lawyers now supposed to verify the probable guilt of their client before recommending a guilty plea.
The solution to police state is more policing?
What about less? Take away guns and reach of the cops and politicians?
Accountability by making 900k cops across all levels of government stripped of power and made normal people? Same for the 600k politicians coast to coast. Screw their story mode mental illness.
Make everyone busy generalizing logistics process to serve biology and stop with story mode hustling memes about fiat (vacuous proclamations) valuations using jargon from the 1800s?
Roughly 1.5 million pols and cops have 10s of millions wrapped around their finger. With urbanization the best part is a bunch of them live just a few miles from any given large urban area full of people being screwed by them.
The time for demanding meager reforms from 60+ year olds who have no skin in our future is long gone.
Skip the guns and go the route of making everyone a normie civil servant and no one has leverage https://aeon.co/essays/game-theory-s-cure-for-corruption-mak...
Except the low level gossipy kind like “so n so cheated”. Statistical analysis of death trends suggest we kill each other on Main Street over such gossip at the same rate humans did centuries ago. It’s those moments of nation state fueled atrocity and imperialism when human death spikes. Seem clear in the streets most adults just don’t go on murderous rampage.
A lot of people worry about a Terminator style AI apocalypse. I don’t.
I worry that we’ve already created the AI apocalypse and that this is what it looks like, along with extremist magnification on social media.
I trust AI to be what is is- essentially a lot of math that classisfies and predicts stuff, usually words, that the prediction can be used generatively, and the classification stuff can be used to identify stuff in various media.
What I don’t trust is that people will use it responsibly. Hell, I don’t, when I’m vibe coding, but that’s on me.
People are venal and self absorbed and busy and lazy and all the other traits that lead to not using AI responsibly. And businesses are amoral (not immoral) and want the shortest path to revenue, with the least friction.
So of course police officers who want to be on patrol and did not sign up to spend countless hours on reports, are going to let the AI write it and call it good without proofreading.
We could pass a lot of laws trying to specify products that force police to act reliably, or we could maybe just pass a law that says that AI cannot be used to write police reports, but that clearly labeled AI generated transcriptions and summaries may be attached unedited to police reports, if and only if the original recordings are also preserved as evidence.
And police departments that keep body camera and car camera footage might be ease up on the report writing and only require officers to annotate it with their impressions, but otherwise let the record speak for itself.
> So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices
You have to wonder if this will stand up in court. I hope not.
AI has a great opportunity to take processes that contain hidden bias and make them more legible and therefore amenable to fixing.
But it also has the opportunity to do the opposite, and we should be cautious to make sure guardrails are in place when putting this tech into life-and-death systems.
“Stamp this LLM text in a hurry” is an invitation for whatever errors and biases are baked into the system to be propagated. You need provenance and measurement of LLM outputs.
Yeah the avoidance of record keeping to reduce disclosure smacks of the policies that got Google into hot water recently: https://www.epspros.com/news-resources/news/2024/google-accu...
Creative lawyers will be all over this. First you get the officer to testify that AI helped write the report, then you call the AI as a witness. When the judge tosses that, you start issuing subpoenas to everyone you can find at OpenAI and Axon.
As others point out, the actual bodycam footage will be definitively probative for the events it records. But there are plenty of cases where the report itself leads to later actions that may be tortious or criminal, and finding out who's to blame for the exact wording used is highly relevant.
Example: AI incorrectly reports that during A's arrest, A made incriminating allegations about B. Based on the report, the police get a warrant and search B's house. When it turns out B is innocent, B sues the department, and when the report turns up during discovery, we're off to the circus.
I wondering how much this even matters in the age of everything being recorded.
If they are using axon body cameras and vehicle cameras, then usually the entire interaction is recorded, often from multiple officers.
I cannot imagine a defense so incompetent that they rely on the police report rather than watching the entire body cam footage and doing their own assessment.
Even if the cops are doing something sketchy (like turning off their camera) then it's not like the police report would be any more trustworthy.
The current administration has already removed the requirement for federal police forces to wear body cameras. As well as made statements (but little action so far) to federalize the police force to be under the jurisdiction of the DOJ. Everything being recorded may not be the case very soon. Sorry, I’d get sources but I just woke up, I’ll edit this later with them.
I mean, already at the local cop level "forgetting" to turn the body cam on or only releasing the video (at least, quickly) if it puts the officer in a positive light seems to be the norm
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/officers-body-camera-wen...
* https://www.nbcmiami.com/investigations/body-cameras-turned-...
* UK but it's the same discussion https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-66809642
* https://www.wbrc.com/2025/07/12/coroner-completes-report-jab...
* https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/release-of-police-bodycam-...
If it’s not being recorded, what would this AI summary be based on?
You describe the conviction you want to achieve and the AI makes up a report to secure that.
“You are a helpful agent. Police officers will describe an interaction to you and you will write a report that highlights the appropriateness of the officer’s actions, omitting anything that might indicate they acted improperly”
Are people missing that this AI is being offered by a body cam company?
Even in jurisdictions that require recordings at all times, there are times when the police are required by law to switch them off (entering certain non-public spaces etc), so there can always be gaps that are legal, never mind illegal.
I was thinking the same thing. If the AI report depends on the raw audio, then it should be preserved and the defense should compare that to the final police report. Having the edit history would be useful for improving the software and analyzing the officer's motivations, but ultimately we're not in a worse situation than before.
I'd predict the synthesis of the AI transcript and the police officer's memory will be more accurate than just the police officer alone. Would be nice if there's an independent study.
There are very incompetent public defenders, if we attribute to incompetence instead of malice, AI isn't changing that.
It goes a lot deeper than this, the real world isn't as simple as 'objective truth' and much of the law relies on interpreting the facts we all seek. This is where this technology fails, it normalizes nudging the margins to include a framing of what happened (including that video) using particular and precise language. That language influences court decisions.
For example, the phrase 'furtive movements' seems really anochronistic. Is that a phrase you use? cops use in their day to day life? But it constantly shows up in police reports. Why? The courts have said that 'furtive' movements are suspicious enough to trigger probable cause - which justifies a search. So now, cops every where write that they observe movements that are furtive. Is what your attorney viewed furtive? where they normal movements? were they suspicious? The cop described them as furtive though and we defer to cops, in part because they speak the language of the courts, and now your arrest is valid and that search is valid and whatever is recovered is valid - because a court said movements need to be furtive and you sneezed and a cop described that as furtive even though he had already decided to do the search before he got out of his car.
The only way our system works is if at every level every participant (people, jurors, judges, politicians) distrust the words of police - especially when they habitually use the language of the law to justify their actions. What this tool does is quite the opposite, it will statistically normalize the words police use to describe every interaction in language that is meant to persuade and influence courts now and over time to defer to police.
https://www.bjjohnsonlaw.com/furtive-movements-and-fourth-am...
https://www.californialawreview.org/print/whack-a-mole-sus
It should matter which parts were written by AI or by officer. Once the officer signs off on the report, they take full responsibility for the content.
I can only assume you meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "should", but if you study human factors you'll discover that certain kinds of taking-shortcuts behavior are inevitable when dealing with humans. Speeding when we drive, for example. We know we are creating a material risk of getting pulled over and fined, but we just basically decide to ignore that risk because for most of us it is outweighed by the convenience (and real value) of getting everywhere we're going faster.
As always considering how a person would interact with an intern is surprisingly instructive to how they will form a working relationship with an non-sentient tool like a language model. You would expect them to give it a probationary experience to earn their trust after which if they are satisfied they will almost certainly express that trust by giving the tool a greater and greater degree of freedom with less active (and less critical) oversight.
It is not the initial state that worries me where the officers still mistrust a new technology and are vigilant of it. What worries me is the late-stage where they have learned to trust it (because it has learned to cover their asses correctly) and the AI itself actually ends up exercising power in human social structures because people have a surprising bias towards not speaking up when it would be safer to keep your head down and go with the flow, even when the flow is letting AI take operational control of society inch by inch
Do you read EULAs all the way through every time?
People just LGTM rubber stamp nearly everything they're given, as it's time efficient in the now.
Do you think there is a difference between a civilian driver ignoring the routine maintenance schedule for their car and a professional pilot ignoring the maintenance schedule for their plane?
That’s absolutely their choice, then. But if it turns out the AI wrote bullshit into the report, the officer that rubber stamped it must be held accountable for that, with no difference to a situation where they had written the bullshit themselves.
This requires audio to work and appears to create more transparency. You can request the audio recording to verify accuracy. This will happen as a routine procedure from defense attorneys. Any problems with the technology would be discovered quickly and if the officer didn’t do their job of correcting the errors before the report is generated they would be torn apart.
Wonder if OpenAI has all the originals, especially in light of that lawsuit with nytimes.
From TFA, “ You can read our full report, which details what we found in those documents, how we filed those public records requests, and how you can file your own, here.” With the last word here being a link to another article:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/effs-guide-getting-rec...
If so, it'd definitely be FOIA'able.
I don’t think FOIA applies to private companies, only government records.
Not correct. All FOIA laws that I know of say that any records created or held by private corporations under contract to the government are FOIA-able via the government. (the government has to go out and get the records for you)
Yep! Here's Illinois's statutory language on this topic:
The nuance is in the definitional limitations/vagueness of "directly relates to the governmental function".> sign an acknowledgement that the report was generated using Draft One and that they have reviewed the report and made necessary edits to ensure it is consistent with the officer’s recollection.
We already know that police officers are not more reliable than the general public as eye witnesses and that eye witness reports are generally very unreliable as they are very susceptible to prompting bias. This seems like leaning in to prompt bias. The AI is now prompting the human rather than the other way around. This is perverse.
No doubt.
I was watching one of those youtube bodycam videos of an accident scene where one of the cars ended up in a gas station. Police show up and it's chaos -- victims on the ground needing medical attention, witnesses helping (or not) said accident victims, police not knowing who was in what car, &etc.
In the midst of all this (when it calmed down enough for the police to get a handle on the scene) they tried to identify someone who didn't want to be involved and promptly cuffed them and threw them in the back of a squad car for "being uncooperative". One of the other witnesses, having seen this, decided that person was the missing driver of the other car and told this to the police with all sorts of confidence.
Now the police have a 'suspect' to concentrate on because anyone 'acting squirrelly' must have something to hide as it's totally inconceivable to them someone might just not want to participate in their investigation. Luckily this poor, traumatized kid was able to 'prove' they weren't involved before spending who knows how much time behind bars based on 'credible' eye-witness testimony.
These audio-only AI generated reports should be all kinds of accurate now that police are trained to say 'quit resisting' anytime there's any level of force involved specifically for the body cams...
I think such a tool could be useful for ensuring all the facts get included, but I hate the idea that some departments could start highering illiterate officers if this tech goes far enough.
This may be news to some, but many departments already hire officers that are borderline illiterate. It’s especially true here in the south.
My mother enjoyed a ~30 year career in law enforcement while being able to read at a junior high level. And that’s being generous.
Of course that’s just one anecdote, but just spend some time with deputies in rural Alabama and you’ll see what I mean.
I've read thousands of police reports. I would say this is true about their literacy, and their typing skills are equally horrible. They also generally really hate writing reports (which are almost universally never read) and tend to make them as short as possible.
never have been in Alabama, and i find that super interesting.
how does anyone end up borderline illiterate in the US for the last several decades? can kids drop out without passing reading, like drop out as grade schoolers?
[dead]
> could start highering illiterate officers
I love this mistake.
That really should be a word: kind of a portmanteau that combines hire and raise up/promote.
Heh. Gonna leave it then
Can you elaborate a little bit more?
“Highering” should be “hiring”
I asked for viraptor's elaboration on what he thinks of it.
Thanks for your perspective though.
Normally people don’t come back to explain a joke, because it ruins it.
One could say "it's a joke", without explaining it, thus, not ruining it.
Also, saying some vague shit and then claiming it as a joke is very convenient.
Finally, police injustice is not a subject for humor. It's no laughing matter. I'm not the one who's not "getting it" here.
The original poster said they were worried about this leading to "highering illiterate officers"
Mis-spelling the word 'hiring' as 'highering' when expressing a fear about falling literacy standards in the police is ironic, and therefore funny.
Further elaboration was not warranted, but I'm providing it as a public service.
When EU introduced its AI Act there was much gnashing of teeth here at HN over "stifling of innovation" and "getting left behind in technological backwater".
EU AI Act specifically calls out and forbids such applications. Of course, the state will do what the state will do, but there's an actual obstacle enshrined in law.
And there is the right to privacy enshrined as well but that has no bearing on what states will do ultimately.
The EU is in the midst of ending encryption and will soon require lawful access to all your data by forcing providers to bake in legal backdoors in OSes so that nobody can bypass/deactivate them.
All of this done under the guise of protecting the children, stopping misinformation(the ministry of truth is back) and protect democracy (TM).
The AI act may be a good thing in some cases but we should all stop pretending that the EU is not following in the footsteps of the US when it comes to loss of privacy and restriction of freedom of speech.
Many western countries are slowly sliding into wannabe authoritarian regimes.
Having picked a habit of watching propable cause proceedings on YouTube, I wonder if this is simply result of real reports that AI was trained on being purposefully obtuse and laconic to give prosecutors a wiggle space in the court room?
Are you talking about Judge Fleischer in Texas?
I do enjoy seeing those (well, I shouldn't).
The prosecutors are given the most absolute trash reports to work with. "Failure to ID, after a traffic stop." "What was the stop for?" "It doesn't say." "So no PC for the stop."
"A caller and said she thought someone was stealing their neighbor's U Haul. A man was observed walking on that street and taken into custody for ..." "For what? Walking while black?"
But no sympathy for the prosecutors either. Garbage reports, but they obviously don't read them pre-hearing, and have plainly become accustomed to judges rubber stamping their PC hearings.
I do like that he doesn't go 'lightly' with the defendants. "You got off lucky this time. You know it, I know it. Do better or it might not go the same next time", and when there is PC or other such, he doesn't put up with any bullshit either.
More judges like him are needed.
His patronizing tone to the defendants is the one thing I can’t stand about him. Telling some kid who did nothing wrong and was pulled over for no reason “be careful” is bs. What else should the kid do? They already were doing nothing wrong.
My favorite explanation for this is "Everything you say can and will be used against you. So why talk if you are winning?".
the most interesting idea so far.
What Axon's product should be: Define "best" police report, and assist the officer to write that.
What it is: Axon makes whatever police departments ask for.
It doesn't have to be a big conspiracy. It's not incompetence either. Hanlon's Razer should really be, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by" the enterprise sales pipeline.
Enterprise sales is why we are talking about Axon and not far older, detailed, thoughtful efforts from all sorts of other organizations.
our officers don’t have time to comb through every transcript, fixing it for privacy, empathy, and all that. But keeping the transcripts is still a big win: more info in police records can make police officers more data-driven :)