ArtificIal intelligence disclosure and inventory

The Problem

Police increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) in criminal investigations to help generate leads, gather evidence, and draft reports. However, AI is still a very new and developing field and AI tools may be unreliable or error prone, misreading visual clues like license plates or “hallucinating” assertions with no basis in fact. Even when it works in theory, it can fail in real-world applications when used by humans. Further, law enforcement’s use of these technologies also raise serious privacy and constitutional concerns, as AI tools are exponentially more powerful than traditional police methods and human capacity.

Despite these risks, laws or policies explicitly requiring officers to inform criminal defendants about their use of AI in the investigative process are rare. This raises accuracy and due process concerns: when the use of AI is not disclosed, the accuracy and legality of the technology and its use will remain unchallenged, undermining a person’s right to a fair trial and possibly resulting in a wrongful conviction. There are also public safety concerns: when an individual is wrongly convicted, an actual perpetrator remains free, and without the ability to review the use of AI in court, unreliable tools or inappropriate uses of AI can slip under the radar and continue to undermine public safety over a longer period of time.

Fortunately, prosecutorial oversight and the adversarial criminal justice system serve as quality controls to find exactly these sorts of issues — a goal that can only be achieved through transparency.

The Solution

The Policing Project’s model statute requires policing agencies to conduct an inventory of and develop a publicly available policy for any use of artificial intelligence to aid criminal investigations, whether to establish leads or corroborate suspicion, or used to write police reports. It also requires agencies to disclose the use of AI in police reports, so that this information will be available to prosecutors, allowing them to comply with legal obligations to disclose the use of AI to criminal defendants.

Read the full model statute on Police Use of AI - Inventory and Disclosure here:

The Policing Project’s disclosure model policy ___.

Read the full model policy here: