That’s the lesson offered by police in Hickman County, Tenn., a rural area with about 26,000 residents.
The sheriff’s department there recently deployed new AI-powered dashcams from Motive, a relative newcomer to the government technology space.
The cameras not only record crimes but monitor the driving of officers, both activities meant to increase the safety of the public and law enforcement.
The use of these cameras comes as artificial intelligence finds its way in a host of governmental tasks — a trend that promises to further shake up gov tech as AI advances and officials and constituents become more comfortable with software designed to think on its own.
Hickman County shows that AI will have an impact on even small and relatively out-of-the-way places, and for public agencies with budgets that are “very limited” like the county sheriff’s department, to use the words of Lt. Michael Doddo.
As he told Government Technology, one of the main purposes of the new dashcams is making it much harder for suspects to lie after they are arrested, charged and brought into court. The high-quality pictures offered by the dashcams have resulted in some suspects taking plea deals instead of risking conviction by a jury.
One example involves a car that “spun out” and someone from that vehicle tossing “a bag of dope out the window,” Doddo said. The suspect took a plea deal instead of going to trial thanks to the clarity of the video.
Such videos — and the dashcams that capture them — are vital to future police work, he said, especially given changing expectations from the public.
“Unfortunately, we live in a society where if you didn’t see it happen, it didn’t happen,” Doddo said. “Law enforcement’s word doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
It’s not only smaller agencies that are deploying the latest dashcams in this shifting atmosphere. Los Angeles is one of the larger cities upgrading in-car cameras and associated technology, including cloud storage of data.
As that happens, more police agencies are setting up what’s commonly called real-time crime centers, and other parts of the justice system are using AI not to catch offenders but help defendants in court.
The entire public safety industry, in fact, is buzzing with activity that also involves improvements to 911 systems — and making that part of the gov tech world attractive to companies that were outside of it.
Motive, for instance, had been selling — and still does — driving safety and fleet management tools for construction, trucking, oil and gas and other industries before “putting our toe” in the public-sector business about two years ago, according to Devin Smith, group product manager for the company.
It’s not only video evidence that matters, but driver safety — that goes for school buses and other forms of publicly supported transit that use the company’s products, too.
Motive’s AI can detect eight to 15 different “behaviors” — perhaps a driver looking too long at a mobile phone — to keep tabs on safety. Drivers can be scored and coached on their unsafe behavior, with the dashcams also recording the details of accidents for later use in insurance claims and court cases.
“It really brings forward a culture of safe driving,” he told Government Technology, and not just potential “exoneration,” as was the traditional aim of older cameras.
He said Motive developed its AI training “in-house” via the work of about 60 machine learning engineers.
