Some top commanders at the Seattle Police Department have been busted for using AI software to track local officers.
The Post Millennial reports that this significant bust comes as artificial intelligence continues to creep into our lives and stories in the media.
The Post Millennial states that the Department has been using Truleos software since 2021. This Chicago-based company says its software was created to analyze phone calls and text messages between Wall Street bankers. However, it seems that the spy-level capabilities of this software have made it too tempting for the Seattle Police Department to keep its hands off of it.
The Department used the software to review body camera footage taken by different officers to find bad policing practices. The Department seems to be trying to bypass human interactions with the software to make decisions about bad policing practices based solely on what the software has to tell them. That is a dangerous game to play, and some are highly concerned that this could lead to problematic policing practices overall. The fact is that people dont want all of these various policing decisions to be left to an AI program that will supposedly track the body camera footage and make decisions based solely on that.
Once the police officers union discovered the software was used, the Department immediately stopped using it.
Seattle Police Officers Guild President Mike Solan spoke with the Ari Hoffman Show and said:
When youre in uniform, you have to inform the community members that, Hey, youre being audio and video recorded, and thats to follow policy.
He then continued by saying:
..would flag, in their view, things that would eventually rate the officers professionalism, such as their inflection of their voice, whether or not that they were sarcastic, what type of words they used.
In other words, it seems that the software was programmed to pick up many false positives and could potentially be used to target officers who didnt do anything wrong. That is the scary part about this for many officers on the force. They dont like the idea of having to try to defend themselves against allegations that arent true.
The situation was described by Solan as: ..the biggest egregious thing that Ive seen in terms of violating trust from an employer to an employee.
Solan added, Its to the point where Ive never seen the level of frustration from the current people that still work for this agency in my 23 years of just being an employee here.
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