After a decade of explosive growth, body cameras are now standard-issue for most American police as they interact with the public. The vast majority of those millions of hours of video are never watched — it’s just not humanly possible.

For academics who study the everyday actions of police, the videos are an ocean of untapped data. Some are now using “large language model” AI’s — think ChatGPT — to digest that information and produce new insights.

Kaste, M. (2024, September 24). Human reviewers can’t keep up with police bodycam videos. AI now gets the job. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/23/nx-s1-5096298/human-reviewers-cant-keep-up-with-all-the-police-body-cam-videos-now-theyre-giving-the-job-to-ai

While academics are using AI from anonymized videos to understand larger processes, some police departments have started using it to help supervise individual officers — and even rate their performance.

“It’s an early warning system to address not just bad behavior, [but] good behavior,” says Nishant Joshi, chief of police in Alameda, California. When he took over as chief three years ago, he brought in a pilot version of Truleo, a system that analyzes automated transcriptions of body camera videos to assesses how officers perform.