Axon Releases Draft One AI System to Automate Police Report Writing from Body Camera Audio

On April 23, 2024, Axon released Draft One, an AI-powered system that automatically generates police report narratives from body-worn camera audio using OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model built on Microsoft Azure infrastructure. The system transcribes audio from Axon Body 3 and 4 cameras uploaded over …

Chicago Terminates ShotSpotter Contract After Years of Criticism

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announces the city is terminating its contract with ShotSpotter, the controversial gunshot detection technology company, bringing to an end one of the largest and longest-running deployments of acoustic surveillance in American policing. The contract will expire on …

ShotSpotter Accuracy Crisis - Chicago Inspector General Report and Williams Case

The reliability and accuracy of ShotSpotter’s gunshot detection technology face a major crisis in August 2021 as the Chicago Office of Inspector General releases a damning report on the system’s effectiveness, while the Michael Williams case exposes evidence that ShotSpotter analysts …

PredPol Rebrands as Geolitica Amid Mounting Criticism of Racial Bias

PredPol, the controversial predictive policing software company, rebrands itself as Geolitica in 2021 as criticism of algorithmic bias in law enforcement intensifies. The rebrand represents an attempt to distance the company from growing scrutiny of predictive policing’s discriminatory impacts …

Amazon launches Rekognition facial recognition service, targeting law enforcement

Amazon Web Services announced the launch of Amazon Rekognition at its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas on November 30, 2016. The cloud-based facial recognition service marked Amazon’s entry into surveillance technology, offering image and video analysis capabilities including face …

ShotSpotter Gunshot Detection System Expands to Major U.S. Cities

ShotSpotter’s acoustic gunshot detection system undergoes major expansion across the United States during 2015, with significant deployments in New York City and Sacramento representing the technology’s growing adoption by major metropolitan police departments.

In August 2015, the New …

PredPol Predictive Policing Software Adopted by 60 U.S. Police Departments

PredPol’s predictive policing software reaches widespread adoption across the United States, with almost 60 police departments using the technology by early 2015. Major cities including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and numerous smaller jurisdictions have implemented the algorithmic crime prediction …

New Orleans Police Launch Secret Palantir Predictive Policing Program

The New Orleans Police Department launches a secretive predictive policing program in partnership with Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The program operates without public knowledge or oversight, escaping scrutiny …

PredPol Predictive Policing Company Founded

PredPol, a predictive policing software company, is founded in Santa Cruz, California by UCLA Professor of Anthropology Jeff Brantingham and mathematician George Mohler. The company emerges from research begun in 2010 when Brantingham recruited UCLA mathematicians to develop algorithms for …