I have exactly one police report with my name in it, and the thing I remember most clearly is that I thought it was well written.
Nothing dramatic: a car window in a parking structure, a tired officer on a Sunday night. Weeks later a copy arrived and I read it twice — the way you do when a document narrates your own bad afternoon back at you in the third person. It moved from time and place to observation to conclusion without a wasted word, and I felt a small, ridiculous flush of reassurance: somebody competent has this.
Here is the confession. That feeling had nothing to do with whether the report was accurate — I still have no idea whether it was. What I was responding to was prose, and I handed it credibility for free, because for most of human history a well-organized paragraph was at least weak evidence that somebody had been careful.
That inference is now worthless. Fluency has become the cheapest commodity on earth. Which is why a California statute that took effect on January 1 has stayed lodged in my head all year: it bans nothing and scolds no one. It makes the document tell you who wrote it.
What the law asks for, and the line that does the real work
California's Senate Bill 524 does not prohibit an officer from using generative AI to draft a report from body-camera audio. It sets conditions. The visible one is famous: an AI-assisted report must, on each page of the official report, or within the body of the text, identify every specific artificial intelligence program used and state, in words the statute dictates, "This report was written either fully or in part using artificial intelligence."
Then the conditions nobody put in the headline, which are the ones that matter:
The agency must keep the machine's output — "the first draft created shall be retained by the agency for as long as the official report is retained."
It must maintain an audit trail identifying the person who used AI and the video and audio footage the report was built from.
The officer must sign, verifying they reviewed the contents and that the facts are "true and correct."
A vendor may not share, sell or otherwise use what police fed into the system, except for the contracting agency's purposes or under a court order.
And the evidentiary hinge, one sentence long: except for the official report itself, a draft created with AI "shall not constitute an officer's statement."
The disclosure tells you a machine was involved; the retained draft and the audit trail let anybody check how involved. That is the entire game.
Signed October 10, 2025, in force January 1, 2026, and sponsored by the California Public Defenders Association — the people who stand next to defendants for a living. Its author, state Senator Jesse Arreguín, put it plainly: hallucinations happen at significant rates, and what goes in a police report can influence whether or not the state takes away someone's freedom. The association's Kate Chatfield went further: "Everyone in the legal system — judges, juries, attorneys and the accused — deserve to know who wrote the police report."
California was not first, and here is where the story gets flattened. Utah got there in May 2025, requiring a report made wholly or partly with generative AI to "contain within the report or record a disclaimer," plus a certification that the author read and reviewed it for accuracy. A real rule — but notice what is absent: no per-page requirement, no naming of the program, no retained draft, no audit trail, no vendor restriction, no clause saying the draft is not the officer's statement.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor and former public defender, dates the sequence exactly: until October 2025 only Utah had required that police even admit they were using an AI assistant, and on October 10 California became the second state to require transparent notice. Utah was first to require disclosure. California was first to make the machine's draft discoverable. Not the same achievement — and that is the whole national picture, at least two states as of mid-2026. You will see a bigger number quoted, more than a dozen, but that covers related technologies: facial recognition, drones, plate readers.
The strongest argument against all this — and where it runs out
The other side's case isn't stupid: officers do drown in paperwork. Axon, whose Draft One leads this market, pitches it as "a force multiplier for officers" that turns body-worn camera audio into draft narratives in seconds, and says officers "spend up to 40% of their time writing police reports." California's police organizations pressed the point: the California Police Chiefs Association and PORAC opposed the bill on administrative-burden grounds. A rule that makes paperwork heavier to fix paperwork is not obviously a win.
Here is where it runs out. The time savings are a vendor claim, and the independent record does not currently back it. The ACLU quotes the criminologist Ian T. Adams flatly: there is "not a single independent evaluation that supports the vendor claims being made to police departments right now." That is an absence of supporting evidence rather than proof of the opposite — a striking absence for a product already drafting documents that put people in cells. A 2024 evaluation found no time savings from Draft One at all, and in a separate experiment reviewers rated AI-assisted reports significantly worse on accuracy while 92 supervisors averaging 22 years of approvals could not reliably tell them from the human-drafted ones.
If two decades of experience doesn't let a sergeant spot the machine, the honor system was never a system. Ferguson's account is worse still: police chiefs using Draft One did not even know which reports were drafted by AI, because officers were cutting and pasting the AI narrative into reports they indicated they wrote themselves. The Electronic Frontier Foundation makes the point from the other end: it is often impossible to tell which parts of a report were generated by AI and which an officer wrote.
Which brings the sharpest fact here. Axon's product page describes logging each use with an event history "to support transparency without storing the draft itself." EFF, which went looking, reports an Axon senior principal product manager saying it out loud: "So we don't store the original draft and that's by design" — the stated reason being to avoid "disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney's offices."
Now reread California's retention clause. The legislature required agencies to keep precisely the artifact the leading product was engineered not to keep. That is not a paperwork rule; that is a state informing a market that its convenience is not the governing value.
EFF itself calls the law a good first step — and only that, adding that more comprehensive regulation, perhaps even prohibition, may still be needed. And let me be careful, because this is the easiest place to overclaim: the audit trail is a design, a capability the law creates. The statute is months old, and nothing in the record yet shows a defendant pulling a first draft into court and setting it beside the final. California built a door; nobody has published what is on the other side.
Now cross the Atlantic, where the brake was a person, not a statute
I came into this piece carrying a sentence I'd heard all summer: that Britain had told its police to stop using AI. Great sentence — wrong in three separate places, and how it is wrong turns out to be the useful part.
In early June 2026, forces in England and Wales were told to pause some uses of generative AI in criminal justice work, including preparing court statements. The trade press carried it on June 6; IBTimes UK, crediting the Financial Times' original reporting, quoted Alex Murray, who leads the newly established Police.AI, saying he had intervened in some cases to stop the rollout. Not all uses. Not all forces. Not permanent, either: as Simon Thorne, a computing lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University, summarizes Murray's position, forces need to slow down and ensure AI systems are properly assessed first — while Police.AI builds its own case-file tools, piloting in 2026 for national rollout in 2027.
Two more precision points. The paused uses were things like converting officer interviews into court statements and preparing disclosure-related documents — not drafting reports from body-camera audio, so the two countries did not regulate the same tool. And Police.AI is not a legislature: it is a body launched with £115 million of Home Office funding, a promised public registry, and a remit covering all 43 forces in England and Wales.
So the real comparison is sharper than the one I arrived with: California passed a statute, England and Wales made a decision.
Researchers at the Oxford Institute of Technology and Justice record that there are "no express statutory regulations on the use of AI in criminal proceedings, as at September 2025" — and, decisively for a defendant, that the Crown Prosecution Service "does not have any binding duties to inform parties when AI has been used to assist in prosecution." Statewatch puts it in a sentence: there is "no specific legal basis governing police use of AI technologies in England and Wales." The government's own factsheet points to the Equality Act 2010 and the Data Protection Act 2018 — general law, no AI statute — while conceding that a policy on what should be disclosed is "currently being developed." There is a transparency covenant forces signed in 2023, and the civil liberties group Liberty's verdict on it: "We are still waiting on them to keep this promise," because forces "cannot be allowed to continue marking their own homework."
You can see what discretion costs when it slips. In January, a chief constable told MPs that a fictitious football match in West Midlands Police intelligence — material behind a decision to ban away fans — arose "as a result of a use of Microsoft Copilot," having earlier told the same committee the force did not use AI. His successor switched Copilot off across the force on his first day. That was intelligence material rather than a court statement — a different failure from the one California legislated about, but the same gap. And deployment keeps growing: a December 2025 study counted 58 AI tools there, including tools used for witness statements or crime reports writing, while a June 2026 mapping found human oversight often existing "in name only, providing a false sense of assurance."
So which country is more protective? The instinct says Britain — a pause sounds stronger than a disclaimer. I think the instinct is wrong. A pause can be lifted by whoever imposed it, quietly, on a Tuesday; a statute has to be repealed in public. And on the question a defendant actually cares about — can I find out whether a machine wrote the words being used against me? — one country has an answer written down and the other has a policy under development.
Just imagine the next five years
None of this needs a breakthrough — only the current trajectory at the current speed.
Imagine the disclosure becoming wallpaper. By 2029 it sits on every page of every report, because the tool is used every time. A warning that is always on isn't information; it's the "this call may be recorded" of criminal procedure.
Imagine the stack going three deep. One model summarizes twelve hours of footage; a second drafts the narrative; a third rewrites whatever creates liability. The audit trail dutifully records "the person who used artificial intelligence," and the honest answer is that no person did — a workflow did. The officer then certifies as "true and correct" an account nobody watched end to end.
Imagine two courtrooms in 2031. In one, a defense attorney requests the retained draft and source footage as routinely as she requests dashcam video today. In the other — a place that paused, unpaused, and never wrote anything down — she asks the same question and is told, correctly, that no rule requires an answer. Neither is far-fetched. The second is the default; the first is what a statute buys.
What the people who study this actually say
The disagreement barely tracks ideology. The ACLU's position is the strongest available: the technology is "too new, untested, unreliable, opaque, and biased for use in the criminal justice system" — an argument against the category, not merely against undisclosed use. Cross the aisle and the machinery looks similar: the free-market R Street Institute argued back in 2017 that "in high stakes realms where the government can keep you locked up or otherwise take away your liberties, we should make our mantra: 'Trust, but verify'", and that it is entirely appropriate for government to set terms in its vendor contracts.
In between sits a nonpartisan national task force convened by the Council on Criminal Justice and chaired by Nathan Hecht, former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, recommending agencies adopt a specific policy for staff use of general-purpose AI tools on case work. Policing's own research shop agrees the governance is thin: the National Policing Institute, surveying 217 law enforcement attendees at one conference, found only 38% acknowledged using AI currently.
Practitioners are not waiting for a legislature. A Washington State county prosecutor's office decided in 2024 not to accept police narratives produced with the assistance of AI — a charging policy binding one office, not a law — and in December 2025 San Diego's department told officers it authorizes no AI tools for report writing at all.
And then Wyoming, the control group: departments in Casper, Evanston and Sheridan are testing these tools with no state law requiring preservation of the original AI draft and none requiring disclosure that AI helped write it — and a 2026 bill amended to carve law enforcement out never reached a floor vote. Not every agency is convinced — departments in Park County have said no thanks — and a former Wyoming attorney general, Gay Woodhouse, put it plainest: in criminal prosecutions, "disclosing everything is much easier than trying to hide the ball."
Ferguson wrote what scholars call the first law review article to take up the question. His framing is the one I keep returning to: the catch with letting a model write your first draft is that this document, unlike a college essay, can determine someone's liberty in court.
What does this mean for you?
You are unlikely to be charged this year, and fairly likely to appear in a police report — as a witness, a complainant, a driver. The practical version:
In California, read the bottom of every page of any report you receive. The disclosure must be there and must name the program. Its absence, where you have reason to think a tool was used, is worth asking about.
If you or someone close to you is charged, hand the attorney two phrases: "retained first draft" and "audit trail." California requires both to exist as long as the report does, and the machine's draft explicitly is not the officer's statement. A capability nobody invokes is indistinguishable from one that isn't there.
Anywhere else in the US, ask your department two questions in writing: does it use generative AI for report narratives, and does it keep the original output? Utah requires each agency to hold a written policy on permitted tools; most states require neither the policy nor the answer.
If you sit on a jury, retire one instinct permanently. A fluent, well-organized narrative is evidence of a good drafting process and nothing more. It was never proof of care.
In England or Wales, the questions are harder. No statutory duty exists to tell you AI was used, and the promised registry is a commitment rather than a right. Ask your force what it uses and whether it keeps what the tool produced.
The lesson, as I see it
I keep coming back to my own well-written report and the reassurance I felt reading it, because the machinery that produced it is exactly what is now being automated. We were never good at judging accuracy. We were good at judging effort, we used prose as the proxy, and the proxy has been severed from the thing it stood for.
You can't fix that by telling people to be more skeptical. Skepticism doesn't scale, and the people most exposed to a police report are the least able to interrogate one. What you can do is make the document carry its provenance: who typed it, what it was built from, what the first version said before anyone tidied it up. Not a ban. A record.
England and Wales have something faster and, for now, more cautious: a national body that can pick up the phone and slow a rollout. I wouldn't sneer at that. But it lives at the discretion of whoever holds the chair, and a defendant cannot cite a phone call. California has something slower and durable — five paragraphs a defense attorney can hold up in front of a judge.
My vote? Take the boring one. The pause is the gesture; the retention clause is the guarantee. The only transparency that survives a change of leadership is the kind somebody wrote down.
Nobody is going to read the small print at the bottom of the page on your behalf. That is more or less the whole job of the HAIA Foundation, and it goes out weekly from over here. Forward this to whoever still believes a well-written document is a careful one.