Wheat Ridge turns to AI so officers spend less time on paperwork

By Nicole Fierro | KDVR FOX 31

WHEAT RIDGE, Colo. (KDVR) — Artificial intelligence is being used more and more in everyday life. Now, the Wheat Ridge Police Department is joining several metro area police departments in using AI technology to cut down time spent on writing out reports.

Draft One is a new software tool for Wheat Ridge officers. It takes their body camera footage and data to transcribe what is heard and seen in a matter of seconds. Officers can then review and add to or change the paragraphs in a report.

“It is just a great stepping stone for each of our individual officers to build off of,” Wheat Ridge Police Public Information Officer Alex Rose said. “In effect, we’re swapping out writing time, writing everything from scratch and from memory, to editing time and I think that that is going to be a huge timesaver for us.”

Rose breaks down the typical time spent on an officer’s 10-hour shift before and after utilizing the software. He said that without the software, about five hours in a shift will go towards responding to calls for service and up to four hours will be spent writing reports on those calls.

“What we’ve learned through the officers that are using this Draft One program is it’s cutting down their report writing time between 40 to 60%,” Rose said. “So if we’re able to cut a report writing time in half, that’s two hours, essentially, that we can give back to every single officer who can get out from behind a keyboard and get out into the community, which is what people in Wheat Ridge want to see.”

FOX31 went through a mock call with an officer as he used his body camera and the software. Within seconds, we watched it take the body camera information and a few prompts from the officer to spit out the start of a narrative report.

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