By Brian Trompeter
The Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) uses, and plans to implement more, innovative technology to fight crime, improve performance and bolster officer safety. But one of those tools is raising a police association’s concerns.
Technology enhances regional crime awareness and helps county police form effective partnerships with neighboring law-enforcement agencies, Police Chief Kevin Davis on March 12 told the Board of Supervisors’ Safety and Security Committee. Technology also poses issues on infrastructure, storage space, hardware and securing people’s privacy and liberties, he said.
“FCPD embraces innovation that is secure and protects individual privacy and puts our officers and resources in the right place at the right time, while keeping them as safe as possible,” Davis said.
The department soon will train officers on Truleo, an artificial-intelligence (AI) system that automatically reviews all police body-worn-camera footage. All of those recordings under the current system “cannot possibly be reviewed,” Davis said, as supervisors must complete audits for every officer.
“But that’s a human auditing technology,” the chief said. “Truleo is technology auditing technology. What Truleo does is capture audio only and transcribes every word that the body-worn camera captures.”
Truleo evaluates only audio obtained when the cameras are turned on. Department officials can tell the system to search not only for objectionable words, but also for ones denoting courtesy,” Davis said.
Because most officers engage the community on a one-to-one basis without a supervisor present, Truleo will allow department officials to evaluate words officers are using with the public and discern whether the language conforms with departmental expectations, Davis said.
But the Fairfax chapter of the Southern States Police Benevolent Association will issue a position soon opposing Truleo, citing privacy and workload concerns, a representative said.
Implementing new technology often produces trepidation amongst officers, Davis said, citing anxieties expressed when body-worn cameras and in-car videos were introduced into policing.
“What I expect will happen with Truleo is we’ll find that our officers more often than not engage in conversations and use words that are consistent with our expectations,” Davis said. “I think we’re going to find out that we are who we say we are. But we’re also going to find out along the way, from time to time, that an officer is not acting like himself or herself and is interacting with community members in a way that is a concern to us and [Truleo] gives us a way to get in front of it.”
Many New York City Police Department officers use Truleo and Fairfax County police “look forward to being one of the first large jurisdictions to use it,” Davis said.
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The Fairfax County chapter of the Southern States Police Benevolent Association (SSPBA) issued a statement March 20 saying it was “deeply concerned” about FCPD’s implementation of a Truleo pilot program and “disappointed” that the police department chose to implement the technology without discussing it at the bargaining table in accordance with Fairfax County’s collective-bargaining ordinance and the recently ratified collective-bargaining agreement.
FCPD officers and the SSPBA have not received any information from Truleo or department officials concerning how they would protect the privacy and biometric data of officers and the community who interact with them, the statement read.
Officers’ supervisors would need to review every “flag” detected by Truleo during myriad interactions between officers and community members, pulling those supervisors off the streets and away from helping officers and the public, SSPBA leaders wrote.
“In essence, the SSPBA is concerned that this AI technology will tether supervisors to their desks and take away their opportunity to provide real-time supervision to the department’s officers,” the group’s statement read.
“The Fairfax County SSPBA maintains that its high degree of professionalism can best be maintained without introducing an AI tool that generates biometric and data privacy concerns, over-extends supervisors, adds significant financial cost to the county and introduces the untested potential of AI-directed bias,” their statement concluded.
