Law enforcement agencies across the world have rushed to integrate AI into their investigations, promising faster arrests and higher case closure rates. The rising number of wrongful arrests attributed to AI facial recognition systems, however, tells another story: that speed and accuracy are two entirely different things.
But while false arrests due to facial recognition software can easily be blamed on glitchy tech, an even more disturbing pattern is starting to emerge, as AI-wielding officers don’t just misidentify suspects, but use the technology to fabricate evidence.
Over the weekend, the BBC reported that officials in Derbyshire County, England are investigating one law enforcement officer who’s alleged to have used generative AI to “create evidential material in a number of cases.”
The yet-unnamed officer has not been arrested, but has been suspended from duty pending the outcome of the investigation, which is reportedly being undertaken by Derbyshire police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
“A criminal investigation has been launched into an allegation of perverting the course of justice after the alleged use of AI systems by an officer to create evidential material in a number of cases,” a Derbyshire police spokesperson told the Financial Times.
It’s the first case of its kind in the UK, coming days after the country’s brand-new national PoliceAI center issued guidance advising officers to stop using generative AI to prepare court statements due to the tech’s tendency to hallucinate answers.
“We’ve said to some police forces, ‘you can’t do that, because we haven’t gone through all the checks and balances,” Alex Murray, head of the PoliceAI center told the FT in an interview. “We need to slow it down a bit.”
While AI hallucinations have indeed found their way into police reports due to laziness — like the case of Utah police whose report claimed an officer transformed into a frog — the seriousness of the Derbyshire investigation suggests that’s unlikely to be the case here.
If anything, it sounds more like the Maine cops who were caught last year posting photographs of a “drug bust” that had clearly been tampered with using generative AI.
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