Cop or AI? This tech makes it hard to tell

This week’s Priorities Podcast is joined by Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who explains why he’s concerned about an AI-powered tool being adopted by police departments. The tool is Axon’s Draft One, which pulls audio from body cam footage to help officers draft police reports. Following a recent investigation into how the technology works, Guariglia claims it was designed without transparency and auditing safeguards that he says ought to be present. He said he’s especially concerned by the window of plausible deniability the technology opens, providing no way for the public to discern between text written by human officers and that generated by software.

This week’s top stories:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday activated the state National Guard to help respond to a cyberattack on the state’s capital city. According to an announcement by Walz’s office, the National Guard’s help was needed because an ongoing cyberattack against St. Paul was larger and more complex than city staff were able to handle. St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter called the attack a “deliberate, coordinated digital attack carried out by a sophisticated external actor.”

Two local governments in Kansas and Nebraska are using GIS, artificial intelligence and lidar to fix accessibility issues with their curb ramps and sidewalks. The technology, which is helping the cities find and fix infrastructure that might not be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, helped save over 1,000 hours of manual labor. 

Delaware’s Department of Technology and Information adopted a policy this month that outlines how and when state employees can use generative artificial intelligence tools, and permits them to use many public and enterprise AI models, but not ones considered to be potentially malicious, like DeepSeek.

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