When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a decade ago, activists hoped it would bring about real change. Years later, despite what's become a multibillion-dollar market for these devices, the tech is far from a panacea. Most of the vast reams of footage they generate go unwatched. And if they do finally provide video to the public, it's often selectively edited, lacking context and failing to tell the complete story. A handful of AI startups see this problem as an opportunity to create what are essentially bodycam-to-text programs for different players in the legal system, mining this footage for misdeeds.

The bill was introduced by Phil Ting: one of 26 state lawmakers misidentified as suspects in an ACLU test of the technology.

Police officers could soon be wearing body-mounted cameras programmed to spot criminals and missing people in real-time, using artificial intelligence. The cameras, built by Motorola and similar to those already used by some US police forces to record an officer's point of view, could also help find missing objects like a stolen car, thanks to machine learning. A prototype of the AI camera is already being developed by Motorola and Neurala, a deep learning startup based in Boston, Massachusetts that recently added its software to drone cameras to help track poachers in Africa. The smart camera will learn while it is used and "automatically search for persons or objects of interest, significantly reducing the time and effort required to find a missing child or suspicious object in environments that are often crowded or chaotic," Motorola and Neurala said in a joint statement. "We see powerful potential for artificial intelligence to improve safety and efficiency for our customers, which in turn helps create safer communities," said Paul Steinberg, chief technology officer of Motorola Solutions.

A police officer equipped with Taser's Axon Flex body camera (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images) Business is booming in the bodycam industry. Police forces across the United States are equipping more of their officers with cameras to gather more information out in the field. But with all that footage comes a tsunami of data that's becoming increasingly difficult to sift through. Taser International, one of the largest manufacturers of police bodycams, wants to bring some of the latest artificial intelligence techniques to make sense of all that footage. On Thursday, the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company said it's making two acquisitions to up its game in the area.

And what kinds of accused offenders could this facial recognition trawl for? It's one thing to set body cameras to identify wanted violent offenders that come into view of body cameras; it's another to scan the streets for those accused of petty offenses. Many cities have sizable numbers of active arrest warrants for minor crimes. A judge has since withdrawn thousands.) Facial recognition software could give police officers unprecedented abilities to exercise "arrest at will" authority over a large proportion of the population. It's not hard to imagine how, without curbs on its use, police could abuse this power against protesters, minorities, or others an individual officer could have bias against.