Technology’s Effect on Advocacy
Axon has acknowledged this is intentional. In a recorded roundtable discussion, Axon’s senior principal product manager for generative AI stated: “So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices.” Let me repeat that. The company that builds the product designed it to avoid the very transparency that accountability requires. They said so on camera.
authoritative” voice, “create reports that could seem superior to what humans produce.” Even when they are less accurate.
Why This Matters for Your Cases.
If you litigate civil rights cases, police misconduct, excessive force, or in-custody death, AI-generated police reports will change your practice through discovery, cross-examination, credibility and bias, and Brady and disclosure obligation. Discovery. You must now affirmatively request the original AI-generated draft of every police report in your case. Under Penal Code section 13663, that draft must be retained. Request it. Compare it line by line to the final signed report. The differencesbetween the two, meaning what the officer added, deleted, or changed, is where your cross-examination begins. Cross-examination. AI-generated reports create a new and powerful line of impeachment. If the final report contains a characterization, an opinion, or a factual assertion that does not appear in the underlying body-worn camera audio, you can now ask the officer: “Did you write that, or did the AI write that?” If the officer cannot answer, that is itself an admission. If the officer says they wrote it, compare it to the AI draft. If the officer says the AI wrote it, ask why they signed a verification stating the facts were true and correct without independently confirming them. In my experience, this is the kind of questioning that resonates with juries. Credibility and bias. AI does not simply transcribe. It interprets. If a subject uses slang, the AI may translate it literally. If a subject says
It gets worse.
The EFF investigation also found that police chiefs using Draft One did not even know which reports in their departments were drafted by AI and which were not. Officers were copying and pasting the AI narrative into reports they indicated they wrote themselves, bypassing all AI disclaimers and audit trails. When one police department received a public records request for Draft One reports, they responded: the reports “are not searchable.” An administrator at another department, upon receiving a similar public records request, wrote in an email to the Axon representative: “We love having new toys until the public gets wind of them.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has raised parallel concerns, citing a peer-reviewed study finding that AI-generated reports were rated “substantively and significantly worse on accuracy” than human-written reports, despite officers being unable to reliably distinguish them from human- written reports. The ACLU warned that because AI tools draw on minute details from body camera transcripts, AI- assisted reports may provide more detail than a typical human report and, combined with AI’s “trained-to-be
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM September/October 2026
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