Idaho police use AI to write reports from body camera footage. Is it a good idea?

A new artificial intelligence tool is trying to address a longstanding problem for police departments all over the country: a backlog of unwatched bodycam footage.

For the last year or so, Pocatello police have used Code Four, an AI tool developed by former students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to sift through bodycam footage and produce draft reports for officers to review. In April, the Pocatello City Council approved a $33,600 contract to continue the program. Now, Caldwell is using it, too.

“The easiest way to think about it is like having an incredibly attentive assistant who watches the entire video, listens to every word and takes notes the whole time,” George Cheng, co-founder of Code Four, told the Statesman in an interview. “It picks up who’s speaking, what’s happening, and the sequence of events — then organizes that into a clear, structured narrative.”

Departments in the Treasure Valley have been using body cameras for more than a decade. Any time police come into contact with the public, those bodycam recordings become important pieces of evidence meant to protect both groups and must be carefully reviewed.

The problem is that bodycam footage can pile up, and processing those recordings takes officers time — valuable time they could be spending out in the field. The officer in charge of the AI real-time information center at the Caldwell Police Department estimates that several hundred hours of footage is being generated by its officers every month.

“We want to do community policing, and we want to make sure that we’re out in the community as much as possible,” Pocatello Police Capt. Zac Bartschi told the City Council in April. “And (Code Four) helps us do that.”

Instead of an officer having to rewatch everything and write it from memory, the new AI software “remembers” the incident for them and turns it into a first draft report they can review and edit before it becomes a public record.

But some legal experts worry that incorrect reports could hurt people’s cases and creates a culture of cutting corners when it comes to the administrative side of policing.

“Accurate and reliable police reports are required in order for our criminal justice system to function properly,” said Scott McKay, a defense attorney and founding partner of the Boise law firm Nevin, Benjamin & McKay. “Prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, judges — they all make decisions on what is written in a police report, and if that report turns out to be inaccurate or wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic.”

‘It’s an incredible tool’

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way law enforcement operates. In Idaho, AI is already monitoring vehicles and loud noises and guiding drones that show up to emergency calls ahead of human first responders.

Code Four has partnered with more than 100 departments across the country, according to its website. The Pocatello Police Department was Code Four’s first customer.

Code Four analyzes information from the sights and sounds body cameras pick up in order to form written conclusions that end up in police reports.

Cheng said he and his business partner slept on the station floor in Pocatello during the early days of their trial run with the department to truly understand their workflows before building the software.

“Pocatello stood out because of their openness to innovation and their willingness to move quickly,” Cheng said. “For us, early partnerships are less about geography and more about finding agencies that want to shape the future of how policing work gets done.”

Pocatello police officials say those innovations could have a practical impact on daily police work.

“It’s an incredible tool,” Pocatello Lt. Akilah Lacey said. “A lot of the time it’s five minutes of excitement responding to a call and five hours of paperwork. Anything we can do to make sure that we’re writing accurate reports in a timely manner just so that we can be out and be a presence is incredibly valuable.”

According to Lacey, who helped set up the Code Four program last year, enforcing the law requires a clear grasp of ethics and a rigorous attention to detail to make sure the job is done well.

But not everyone is so on board. The question of who’s responsible for remembering the facts of a police call raises new ethical questions about police work, experts say.

Outsourcing the task of writing a police report to AI fundamentally changes the officer’s role, reducing their involvement to reviewing and approving pre-generated text, according to a report on AI reviewing bodycam footage published in 2025 by the New York-based legal nonprofit Fair And Just Prosecution. This leads to “cognitive offloading,” a psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals rely on technology to perform mental tasks, thereby conserving effort but reducing engagement and retention.

“The process of cognitive offloading may lead to complacency by the reviewing officer, allowing small mistakes to slip through unnoticed,” the report said. “A prosecutorial office made aware of an inaccuracy in an AI-generated police report may be obligated to flag the officer who approved the report as an unreliable witness and to disclose the inaccuracy to defendants in future cases in which the officer is involved.”

AI cannot replace ‘human element’

Code Four’s founders acknowledge that without highly trained officers to interpret and reflect on what the AI tool has written, these tools are just as prone to misuse as any other technology.

“AI is never perfect,” Cheng said, “AI is just a program — a bunch of zeros and ones.”

Lacey said the reports come out more efficiently with Code Four, but the department set strict rules about how it could be used.

“Whenever we’re dealing with violent crimes, matters of abuse, or similarly severe cases, we rely on the human intelligence of our highly trained staff to review bodycam footage and prepare reports,” Lacey told the Statesman in an interview.

The biggest thing the AI review tool does for Pocatello Police is free up the department’s four highly trained “stenographers” to handle serious cases by helping officers draft reports for traffic stops, noise complaints and similar calls that are unlikely to lead to a court case.

Megan Swenson, lead stenographer for the Police Department, said her team works with officers and analysts to transcribe the department reports while meticulously reviewing the facts of cases ranging from the highly sensitive violent crimes to routine traffic stops. Her team’s workload has been increasing while the stenographer pool has remained stagnant.

“We’ve been able to utilize our time better so we can focus on the quality of our work, helping the detectives with their investigations,” Swenson said by phone. “Prior to Code Four, we felt somewhat of a burden from the workload that we had, and now I feel like as a team we’re kind of in that sweet spot.”

In its first year with its new AI video auditor, the department has yet to confront any issues with the reports the tools may create and plans to continue prioritizing human review of sensitive cases.

“I haven’t experienced it yet, but we need to see if this technology can pick up on the nuances of human relationships,” Lacey said. “Right now we don’t know. That’s where we come in as the human element. Our training and our experience conducting calls and investigations cannot be replaced.”

The Ada County Sheriff’s Office, which provides law enforcement services in Eagle, Star and Kuna, says it’s tested a competing AI bodycam review tool provided by security tech company Axon but decided not to use the tools. A spokesperson for the Boise Police Department told the Statesman they do not use AI tools to review bodycam footage.

Gary Raney, a liability and litigation consultant and former Ada County Sheriff, sees the advent of AI tools being used as a reviewer for the high volume of footage as inevitable, but merits increased caution from any officer who would use it.

“Anyone who thinks we’re going to backtrack with AI in law enforcement isn’t living in the real world,” Raney said. “There’s nothing wrong with using an AI tool to make a report more accurate or to be more efficient, so long as that final content that gets signed off on is the original work of a law enforcement officer, meaning they have written it.”

Raney said he is concerned for future violations of federal laws that require the government to disclose material that could exonerate defendants, a federal standard for law enforcement that comes from the landmark 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland. In Raney’s view, if the AI misses important context in a bodycam video that could clear someone of wrongdoing, and an officer fails to review it, their department could be held liable.

“The fear isn’t AI, it’s people,” Raney said. “Eventually, some officer somewhere will see AI review tools like (Code Four) normalized, and they will cut corners. When that happens, there will be trouble.”