Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making inroads with San Luis Obispo County’s public safety agencies in a bid to make workflow easier.
The Grover Beach Police Department is, so far, the only known police force in the county that’s tried out a report-writing tool called Draft One.
Powered by Arizona-based technology company Axon—previously TASER International—Draft One aims to save officers time when they write police reports by analyzing and transcribing body camera footage to generate a first draft of an incident.
But at $65 per officer per month, the AI program proved to be too expensive for the 24-officer Grover Beach Police Department once it completed a 90-day free trial period early this year.
“I think I did find it to save me a little bit of time. However, the time that I saved wasn’t substantial,” officer Raul Chavez said. “I would be saving maybe five to 10 minutes on a report that is probably a two-to-three-hour report. … For the cost of that software, I don’t think it was worth it for the department at that time to upfront that cost.”
Chavez told New Times that some other officers didn’t use Draft One because they were wary of using AI to write police reports.
For Chavez, who described himself as someone who pays attention to detail and took pride in his report writing, Draft One drained color from the bones of a report.
“Every officer has a different writing style when writing their police reports,” he said. “Draft One will auto-generate a report, but when you go through and you read the report, the rough draft … doesn’t sound like a natural report that was written by somebody. It sounds a little robotic, in a sense, you know?”
Grover Beach police already use body cameras and Tasers made by Draft One’s parent company, Axon. When they were testing the program, officers returning from responding to an incident would upload body camera footage to police desktop computers set up with Draft One. The program would scan audio from the footage to transcribe a police report draft before saving the videos on cloud services.
While the information Draft One included in its rough outlines was accurate and noted down narration from officers well enough, according to Chavez, he still had to include missed details during the editing process.
“Draft One wasn’t able to put in what the dispatcher told the officer over the radio,” he said. “So, if a reporting party tells the dispatcher something that is pertinent for the officer to know—such as if it’s a call where weapons may be involved, that’s something for the officer to know.”
Draft One isn’t connected to either the officers’ earpieces or the radio that relays details from dispatchers.
Grover Beach Police Chief Jim Munro told New Times that during the pilot period, certain safeguards were put into place to keep Draft One in check.
“The officers weren’t allowed to use it for arrests other than misdemeanors,” he said. “That way there wasn’t any issue we’d come across for a high-level case.”
Officers also couldn’t submit reports made using Draft One without reviewing, editing, and signing them. Those reports also contained a disclaimer saying portions were composed using AI.
There were no safeguards for privacy, according to Munro. He added that all cloud services that store uploaded body camera footage are secure at the back end, tested, and have been signed off by the FBI.
“Even before AI, all our footage was stored on that cloud,” he said. “Rarely is it stored on premises anymore. … The biggest takeaway is that we did test [Draft One], and we determined it wasn’t a good fit for us. Not everything that is brand new we’re going to latch on to.”
Ultimately, the tool didn’t meet the department’s requirements of being a time-saver, improving workflow, and keeping people safer.
In neighboring Santa Barbara County, the Santa Maria Police Department is going through its own free trial period using Draft One. Cmdr. Dan Cohen told New Times that the trial period surpassed 90 days but declined to share details since it’s still ongoing.
Since Draft One became available in April 2024, it’s been used by agencies like the Campbell, Oklahoma, and Fresno police departments, too.
“Earlier this year we shared that Draft One has contributed to over 100,000 incident reports and saved officers 2.2 million minutes—that’s almost four years of writing reports 24/7,” an Axon spokesperson told New Times.
The spokesperson added that Axon spoke with several district and defense attorneys while creating Draft One.
“Agencies and attorneys tell us reports written today can be of low quality—poor spelling and grammar, insufficient detail, elements copied over from old reports,” the Axon spokesperson said. “Results showed that Draft One performed equal to or better than officer-only report narrative drafts across five dimensions, including completeness, neutrality, objectivity, terminology, and coherence.”
The Grover Beach Police Department engaged the SLO County’s District Attorney’s Office last fall before signing up for the trial period.
DA Dan Dow told New Times that the Fresno County DA served as a consultant to Axon when Draft One was in development. Dow initially had some concerns about AI-generated police reports, prompting Grover Beach to install safeguards.
“We wanted to be sure that the investigative report that’s submitted to our office, that we’re relying on to make important charging decisions, is truthful,” he said. “We want to make sure that it is authored by the person who saw and perceived the evidence to have the interviews. We don’t want, you know, just a computer doing it randomly.”
Eventually, Dow said, the world won’t remember a time before AI even though it’s in its infancy now and prone to producing false information.
“We don’t want to ever remove human judgment from processes that are so important in the area of justice and safety,” he said. “I actually think AI will probably help us get to better results, as long as we are very careful, and we don’t rely on it.”
The DA’s Office itself is poised to enter a three-year contract with a digital analyst tool for investigations and prosecutions called Closure Intelligence. The SLO County Board of Supervisors approved the $180,000 contract as a consent agenda item on Nov. 4.
Closure Intelligence claims to combat “evidence overload.” According to its website, it’s discovered homicide confessions in two minutes, saved a California District Attorney more than 1,800 hours in investigating jail communications, and analyzed 3,000 pages of cold case evidence.
“We would only obtain the documents lawfully first,” Dow said. “It’s not open to the larger AI world. … We have a lot of protected information in the DA’s Office and in our file, and only if that were to be somehow unlawfully lost or shared would that ever be a compromise of a person’s privacy. But the system that we have is designed to keep it completely self-contained.”
Meanwhile, in Grover Beach, officers are back to writing their own reports, but they’re on the lookout for other AI tools that can speed things up.
“There is other software out there that can take a video and [point] to different things like a person with a gun or people fighting,” Police Chief Munro said. “Right now, we have officers watching every second of the video. In the future, we can have AI look for it and identify.” ∆
Reach Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal at brajagopal@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Nov 13-23, 2025.