CLOQUET, Minn. — The Cloquet Police Department will begin using AI software to draft police reports using body camera footage and audio. While city officials are hopeful the software will streamline officers’ workloads, digital advocacy groups have raised concerns over the software’s lack of transparency.

On Tuesday, Feb. 17, the Cloquet City Council voted 5-1 to approve the police department’s 34-month contract with Axon Enterprise’s Draft One for just shy of $65,000.

“This technology super trend is obviously slow to get to law enforcement, but it’s slowly making its way,” Cloquet Police Chief Derek Randall said. “Obviously, with us being a smaller community, fewer folks, we’re a little bit behind the times.”

The police department has trialed the technology for the past two months and found that it reduces the time to generate a police report — which Randall said can take several hours to days — to just under an hour.

“This makes (police) more efficient, this makes our budget better, this allows us a little bit of a bridge in a time where we are struggling and every other department is struggling to find officers,” City Administrator Tim Peterson said. “I think that this is something that we need to do for our police department, and is the responsible thing to do for our officers.”

However, the technology has faced criticism in an investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group dedicated to protecting digital rights. It found Draft One seemed deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public.

“There is no meaningful way to audit Draft One usage, whether you’re a police chief or an independent researcher, because Axon designed it that way,” the report states.

Following advocacy by the San Francisco-based group, the state of California passed a law in October requiring police to disclose whether an incident report was written with AI.

Peterson insisted the Cloquet police department would remain committed to the same level of transparency.

“We would still fall back on the same exact policies, the same exact state statutes and data request policies that we have,” he said. “It wouldn’t make it more available or less available. We would follow the exact same policies and procedures that we have for people having access to it.”

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Councilor Lyz Jaakola, the sole dissenting vote, expressed concern that officers would delegate too much responsibility to the AI software.

“The decisions that law enforcement officers make, even when they’re drafting their reports, come from a human standpoint, and AI cannot replicate that judgment that a human does or has,” she said.

Randall stated that the technology would allow for more thorough reports, which must be reviewed and edited by the officer before being approved.

Councilor Lara Wilkinson affirmed the positive impacts AI can have on workplace efficiency.

“It creates a multitude of efficiencies for some of those more mundane tasks that allow us to leverage our human talent more valuably,” she said. “If we weren’t using it and didn’t learn to use it, we would not be able to keep pace within the industry.”

Councilor Chris Swanson expressed privacy concerns over how the AI software would use information gathered through body cameras.

“AI models are using information that’s coming in to get supposedly, smarter and smarter, right? The more information they get, the more accurate they are,” he said. “So how is it that we can make sure that our interactions between our police and our citizens are not being exploited?”