How the largest gathering of US police chiefs is talking about AI

It bills itself as the largest gathering of police chiefs in the United States, where leaders from many of the country’s 18,000 police departments and even some from abroad convene for product demos, discussions, parties, and awards. 

I went along to see how artificial intelligence was being discussed, and the message to police chiefs seemed crystal clear: If your department is slow to adopt AI, fix that now. The future of policing will rely on it in all its forms.

In the event’s expo hall, the vendors (of which there were more than 600) offered a glimpse into the ballooning industry of police-tech suppliers. Some had little to do with AI—booths showcased body armor, rifles, and prototypes of police-branded Cybertrucks, and others displayed new types of gloves promising to protect officers from needles during searches. But one needed only to look to where the largest crowds gathered to understand that AI was the major draw. 

The hype focused on three uses of AI in policing. The flashiest was virtual reality, exemplified by the booth from V-Armed, which sells VR systems for officer training. On the expo floor, V-Armed built an arena complete with VR goggles, cameras, and sensors, not unlike the one the company recently installed at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department. Attendees could don goggles and go through training exercises on responding to active shooter situations. Many competitors of V-Armed were also at the expo, selling systems they said were cheaper, more effective, or simpler to maintain. 

The pitch on VR training is that in the long run, it can be cheaper and more engaging to use than training with actors or in a classroom. “If you’re enjoying what you’re doing, you’re more focused and you remember more than when looking at a PDF and nodding your head,” V-Armed CEO Ezra Kraus told me. 

The effectiveness of VR training systems has yet to be fully studied, and they can’t completely replicate the nuanced interactions police have in the real world. AI is not yet great at the soft skills required for interactions with the public. At a different company’s booth, I tried out a VR system focused on deescalation training, in which officers were tasked with calming down an AI character in distress. It suffered from lag and was generally quite awkward—the character’s answers felt overly scripted and programmatic. 

The second focus was on the changing way police departments are collecting and interpreting data. Rather than buying a gunshot detection tool from one company and a license plate reader or drone from another, police departments are increasingly using expanding suites of sensors, cameras, and so on from a handful of leading companies that promise to integrate the data collected and make it useful. 

Police chiefs attended classes on how to build these systems, like one taught by Microsoft and the NYPD about the Domain Awareness System, a web of license plate readers, cameras, and other data sources used to track and monitor crime in New York City. Crowds gathered at massive, high-tech booths from Axon and Flock, both sponsors of the conference. Flock sells a suite of cameras, license plate readers, and drones, offering AI to analyze the data coming in and trigger alerts. These sorts of tools have come in for heavy criticism from civil liberties groups, which see them as an assault on privacy that does little to help the public.