For decades, new technology in policing and the courts has come with the same pitch: it will make the system fairer, more accurate and less shaped by the racial bias of the people enforcing the law. The promises keep coming. A more equitable justice system keeps not arriving.
Two of the clearest examples are acoustic gunshot detection, best known by the brand name ShotSpotter, and automated license plate readers like those sold by Flock Safety. Both were sold as ways to make communities safer. Neither has done that, and there is a real case that both have made communities less safe. They send police racing into neighborhoods on false alerts, turn ordinary residents into suspects and pull officers’ time away from investigating real crimes.
Now a new wave of AI products is aimed at police and prosecutors, and the sales pitch sounds familiar. Axon is marketing an AI tool that scans body-worn camera video and drafts police reports. Truleo is promoting an AI “detective” to help investigate crimes. Other tools comb through prosecutors’ case files and suggest leads the prosecutors missed.
These tools raise hard questions. What happens when an AI writes the official record that decides whether someone is charged? Who is accountable when it gets something wrong? And what about AI sycophancy, the tendency of AI systems to tell users what they want to hear? An officer or prosecutor looking for confirmation of a theory may get exactly that, whether or not it is true.
Our Guest: Jake Laperruque
To dig into these issues, we sit down with Jake Laperruque, Deputy Director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. Jake explains how these tools actually work, why law enforcement keeps embracing technology that underperforms, and what safeguards communities should demand before AI becomes part of how justice is handed out.
What We Cover
- What AI sycophancy is and why it is dangerous in a criminal case
- The risks of AI-written police reports built from body camera footage
- AI “detectives” and prosecutors’ lead-generating tools
- Why ShotSpotter works as a “probable cause generator,” and why police defend it despite its failures
- What accountability should look like before these tools are deployed
Why It Matters
Technology does not fix a broken justice system on its own. When police and prosecutors adopt tools that no one outside the vendor can inspect, the public loses the ability to check how decisions about arrests and charges are made. Demanding transparency and accountability for these tools before they are deployed is central to the Chicago Justice Project’s mission.
Support CJP: https://chicagojustice.org/donate/
Get Involved: https://chicagojustice.org/become-part-of-the-cjp-nation/
