Should Idaho Police Use AI to Write Reports From Body Cam Footage?
Should Idaho Police Use AI to Write Reports From Body Cam Footage?
Publish Date: 2026-06-26 15:58:00
Source Domain: www.govtech.com
(TNS) — 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…
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