The Belleville Police Services Board approved a pilot project of the Axon DraftOne Generative AI Reporting Solution at its meeting on Thursday.
The solution is a dictation system based on artificial intelligence that utilizes body-worn camera footage, e-notes and speech to text to generate a police report.
Officers will have to review and edit the report to verify the accuracy before submitting the report.
“It’s a pilot project, so we’ve agreed to a six-month pilot with (Axon). There’s no cost to the taxpayer whatsoever, nothing comes from our budget, and we are already partners with Axon with our tasers and with our body-worn cameras,” Acting Chief of Police for the City of Belleville, Chris Barry, tells media.
“It’ll be a one stop shop for our officers, and we are the first agency in Canada to pilot this.”
Currently, Belleville police use the system “Dictaphone” which requires an officer to dial into the system and dictate a report over the phone.
The call recording would then go into a queue where one of four full-time transcribers picks up the call and manually transcribes the report, links the involved persons, and attaches the report into police’s records management system.
In Acting Chief Barry’s report to the board, it states that this system has been “extremely inefficient and labour intensive.”
According to the report, the queue currently sits at approximately 750 reports waiting to be transcribed with the service two months behind in the transcription process.
The system is also no longer supported by the vendor and will need to be replaced in 2025.
Belleville police looked into a replacement solution in 2021 and at the time evaluated Nuance Winscribe.
While the service was described as better than the current one, it was determined that it was still not the perfect fit. The solution was quoted as $50,431.95 USD for purchase, plus an ongoing maintenance fee of $21,211.95 USD a year.
Police then commenced working with Axon on a solution.
The pilot project will be in effect until December 2024 when police will then evaluate the program.
A report providing analysis of the project and the costs/benefits is set to be provided to the board in December 2024.
