By Corporal Micah Smith
This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Insighter Magazine, published by FBI-LEEDA.
Today it seems like every time you open social media or look at the news, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the forefront of discussion. Good or bad, AI is here to stay, and with time it will only grow smarter and proliferate further into our daily lives. We all probably interact with forms of AI today and do not even realize we are doing it. The big question we all have as law enforcement professionals is this, “When will AI break into our industry, and in what ways?”
The big question we all have as law enforcement professionals is this, “When will AI break into our industry, and in what ways?”
In fact, AI has already begun to creep into our professional lives. According to OpenAI’s ChatGPT (GPT = Generative Pre-Trained Transformers), AI’s use in law enforcement today includes facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPR), social media monitoring, crime analysis for investigation and predictive policing, and forensic analysis, just to name a few.
The actual AI portions of these technologies take the form of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Machine Learning (ML), Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Natural Language Processing (NLP). These forms take the job of AI and its abilities deeper than what we might be used to with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, DALL-E, or Sora, Google’s Gemini, or Grammarly, which are common generative AI options made up of Large Language Models (LLMs), text-to-image, and text-to-video generators.
What does this mean for law enforcement leaders? Using my agency as an example, we recently moved to put out a general order prohibiting the use of AI in all forms except those explicitly approved by the command staff and vetted by our vendors. What we may not realize is that our officers are innocently feeding privileged and confidential information to AI models. This data could be kept by the service and used to train the model for use by everyone in the future.
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An example of this could be a patrol officer using Grammarly or ChatGPT to check their report narrative for grammatical mistakes. A quick search of Grammarly’s website tells us that they take security and privacy very seriously, but use data to train their AI model and share the data with “…our small number of thoroughly vetted partners…” They go on to state the data is not used to train their “partners’” products.
Grammarly’s website also states that they do not own the data used in their service. According to the security firm Forcepoint, ChatGPT “…collects both your account-level information as well as your conversation history. This includes records such as your email address, device, IP address and location, as well as any public or private information you use in your ChatGPT prompts.” They then use this data to train their AI model.
The ownership of the generated responses is still up for debate, meaning a corrected narrative could be public domain. With law enforcement narratives stored on their servers, much like our own, they are just one more weak point away from a hack and discovery.
Now is the time for law enforcement leaders to decide for their agencies to protect the security of their data. Regulation and legislation have been far too slow to reign in AI development and protect data. There are always pros and cons to a new technology, but AI has the potential to be the most dangerous new form of technology if not used properly and with the right guidance.
RESOURCES
OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
Privacy. Grammarly. (n.d.). https://www.grammarly.com/privacy
Yes, CHATGPT saves your data. here’s how to keep it secure. Forcepoint. https://www.forcepoint.com/blog/insights/does-chatgpt-save-data
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Corporal Micah Smith of the Mountain Brook Police Department (Alabama) has been in law enforcement for six years. He has been serving as the department’s Technical Services Officer for over 3 years, specializing in all forms of law enforcement technology. His purview includes records/jail management systems administration and maintenance, NIBRS compliance, fingerprint records management, department proximity security, immigration inquiries, hardware/software maintenance, and fleet equipment management. As a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BS in Criminal Justice, and coming from a law enforcement family, he quickly found that law enforcement technology was his calling. He is continuing his education by pursuing a MS in Management of Information Systems, also from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Micah also serves as team leader of the department’s Honor Guard unit, a certified Peer Support member, a certified firearms instructor, and weapons armorer.