•  
  •  
 

Publication Date

10-5-2025

Abstract

Police reports play a central role in the criminal justice system. Many times, police reports exist as the only official memorialization of what happened during an incident, shaping probable cause determinations, pretrial detention decisions, motions to suppress, plea bargains, and trial strategy. For over a century, human police officers wrote the factual narratives that shaped the trajectory of individual cases and organized the entire legal system.

This practice is about to change with the creation of AI-assisted police reports. Today, with the click of a button, large language models (LLMs), a type of generative AI using predictive text capabilities, can turn the audio feed of a police-worn body camera into a pre-written draft police report. Police officers then fill in the blanks of a few facts and submit the edited version as the official narrative of an incident.

From the police perspective, AI-assisted police reports offer clear efficiencies from dreaded paperwork. From the technology perspective, ChatGPT and similar generative AI models have shown that LLMs are good at predictive text prompts in structured settings. Yet hard technological, theoretical, and practical questions have emerged about how generative AI might infect a foundational building block of the criminal justice system.

This is the first law review article to address the challenges presented by AI-assisted police reports. The Article first interrogates the technology, providing a deep dive into how AI-assisted police reports work. Promises of innovation are countered by concerns about how the models were trained; questions regarding error, hallucinations, and bias in transcription; and uncertainty over how the final police report will be impacted by the generative prompts. Issues including structure, timing, legal gap-filling, and factual gap-filling are all addressed, with an eye toward comparing this innovation to existing human report writing.

The Article also addresses theoretical questions about the role of the police report and contrasts two visions of a police report: a narrow, instrumental view and a broader accountability view. The goal is to show how a change in technology might also change the traditional role of the police report.

Finally, the Article explores how AI-assisted police reports will alter criminal practice, especially in misdemeanor and low-level felony cases where investigation and grand jury action are minimal. A police officer’s determination of what happened as a factual and legal matter directly impacts initial prosecutorial charging decisions and judicial pretrial detention decisions. In addition, the police report influences plea bargains, sentencing, discovery obligations, and trial practice. The traditional standards of reasonable suspicion, probable cause, and proof beyond a reasonable doubt—historically grounded in the detailed factual narratives drafted by police officers—are now being replaced by AI-generative suspicion. The open question is how reliance on AI-generative suspicion will distort the foundation of a legal system dependent on the humble police report.

Download

Share

COinS