Identity theft involving stolen driver's licenses creates lasting legal exposure unlike credit card fraud, as license numbers cannot be changed and require extensive cleanup efforts.

At an airport in South Carolina on Thursday, US representative Nancy Mace called police officers "fucking incompetent" and berated them repeatedly, according to an incident report. Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican congresswoman, unleashed a tirade against law enforcement at the Charleston International Airport on Thursday, WIRED has learned. According to an incident report obtained by WIRED under South Carolina's Freedom of Information Act, Mace cursed at police officers, making repeated derogatory comments toward them. The report says that a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) supervisor told officers that Mace had treated their staff similarly and that they would be reporting her to their superiors. According to the report, officers with the Charleston County Aviation Authority Police Department were tasked with meeting Mace at 6:30 am to escort her from the curb to her flight and had been told that she would be arriving in a white BMW at the ticketing curb area.

Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant.Mother Jones illustration; Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma; Arthur Ogleznev/Unsplash; Logan Weaver/Unsplash In April 2024, the American police tech firm Axon, which leads the market for police body cameras, released a tool it billed as "revolutionary": Draft One, an AI-powered software package that would turn body camera footage and audio into intelligible police reports. Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant, providing more than 5,000 police departments across the country with a suite of cloud-based products to manage evidence collection and storage. Draft One, the AI tool, connects with the company's body cameras and evidence storage service to write police reports with little human intervention. At least 21 departments have experimented with the software. The use of artificial intelligence in generating police reports has been particularly troubling, according to civil rights advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU, because of generative AI's propensity towards racial and gender bias, and its tendency to insert inaccuracies into texts--including wholesale inventions known by technologists as "hallucinations." "I can almost guarantee [AI] reports have been used in plea deals," a police captain wrote.

Road accidents pose significant concerns globally. They lead to large financial losses, injuries, disabilities, and societal challenges. Accurate and timely accident data is essential for predicting and mitigating these events. This paper presents a novel framework named 'Durghotona GPT' that integrates web scraping and Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the generation of comprehensive accident datasets from prominent national dailies in Bangladesh. The authors collected accident reports from three major newspapers: Prothom Alo, Dhaka Tribune, and The Daily Star. The collected news was then processed using the newest available LLMs: GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and Llama-3. The framework efficiently extracts relevant information, categorizes reports, and compiles detailed datasets. Thus, this framework overcomes limitations of manual data collection methods such as delays, errors, and communication gaps. The authors' evaluation demonstrates that Llama-3, an open-source model, performs comparably to GPT-4. It achieved 89% accuracy in the authors' evaluation. Therefore, it can be considered a cost-effective alternative for similar tasks. The results suggest that the framework developed by the authors can drastically enhance the quality and availability of accident data. As a result, it can support critical applications in traffic safety analysis, urban planning, and public health. The authors also developed an interface for 'Durghotona GPT' for ease of use as part of this paper. Future work will focus on expanding data collection methods and refining LLMs to further increase dataset accuracy and applicability.

Estimating population parameters in finite populations of text documents can be challenging when obtaining the labels for the target variable requires manual annotation. To address this problem, we combine predictions from a transformer encoder neural network with well-established survey sampling estimators using the model predictions as an auxiliary variable. The applicability is demonstrated in Swedish hate crime statistics based on Swedish police reports. Estimates of the yearly number of hate crimes and the police's under-reporting are derived using the Hansen-Hurwitz estimator, difference estimation, and stratified random sampling estimation. We conclude that if labeled training data is available, the proposed method can provide very efficient estimates with reduced time spent on manual annotation.

A bill headed to Utah's Senate floor would require police to include disclaimers in any report written with help from artificial intelligence. Introduced by Sen. Stephanie Pitcher, SB180 comes nearly a year after multiple police agencies across the country began testing software like Axon's Draft One, prompting concerns from critics and privacy advocates. Draft One was announced by Axon in April 2024, kicking off a major new phase for the company best known for manufacturing tasers and a popular line of body cameras used by law enforcement. Axon built Draft One using Microsoft's Azure OpenAI platform, and is designed to auto-generate police reports using only an officer's body cam audio records. Once processed, Draft One then crafts "a draft narrative quickly," reportedly cutting down on police officer's paperwork by as much as an hour per day.

The American Civil Liberties Association (ACLU) is sounding a warning about the use of AI in creating police reports, saying the tech could produce errors that affect evidence and court cases. The nonprofit highlighted the dangers of the tech in a white paper, following news that police departments in California are using a program called Draft One from Axon to transcribe body camera recording and create a first draft of police reports. One police department in Fresno said that it's using Draft One under a pilot program, but only for misdemeanor reports. "It's nothing more than a template," deputy chief Rob Beckwith told Industry Insider. "It's not designed to have an officer push a button and generate a report." He said that the department has seen any errors with transcriptions and that it consulted with the Fresno County DA's office in training the force, However, the ACLU noted four issues with the use of AI.

Several police departments nationwide are debuting artificial intelligence that writes officers' incident reports for them, and although the software could cause issues in court, an expert says, the technology could be a boon for law enforcement. Oklahoma City's police department was among the first to experiment with Draft One, an AI-powered software that analyzes police body-worn camera audio and radio transmissions to write police reports that can later be used to justify criminal charges and as evidence in court. Since The Associated Press detailed the software and its use by the department in a late August article, the department told Fox News Digital that it has put the program on hold. "The use of the AI report writing has been put on hold, so we will pass on speaking about it at this time," Capt. Valerie Littlejohn wrote via email.

Police departments are often some of the tech industry's earliest adopters of new products like drones, facial recognition, predictive software, and now–artificial intelligence. After already embracing AI audio transcription programs, some departments are now testing a new, more comprehensive tool--software that leverages technology similar to ChatGPT to auto-generate police reports. According to an August 26 report from Associated Press, many officers are already "enthused" by the generative AI tool that claims to shave 30-45 minutes from routine officework. Initially announced in April by Axon, Draft One is billed as the "latest giant leap toward [the] moonshot goal to reduce gun-related deaths between police and the public." The company--best known for Tasers and law enforcement's most popular lines of body cams--claims its initial trials cut an hour of paperwork per day for users.

Two teenage boys from Miami, Florida were arrested in December for allegedly creating and sharing AI-generated nude images of male and female classmates without consent, according to police reports obtained by WIRED via public record request. The arrest reports say the boys, aged 13 and 14, created the images of the students who were "between the ages of 12 and 13." The Florida case appears to be the first arrests and criminal charges as a result of sharing AI-generated nude images to come to light. The boys were charged with third-degree felonies--the same level of crimes such as grand theft auto or false imprisonment--under a state law passed in 2022. It makes it a felony to share "any altered sexual depiction" of a person without their consent.