SARATOGA SPRINGS -- The Saratoga Springs Police Department is integrating a new software platform that will allow it to connect numerous technologies it has access to such as cameras in the city and use artificial intelligence to expand its policing capabilities.
The city approved incorporating Axon Fusus software for $541,632 over five years at a recent City Council meeting.
Axon Fusus is a Scottsdale, Arizona-based public safety technology company with satellite locations in Seattle, Vietnam, Finaland, Australia, Netherlands and England.
Police Chief Tyler McIntosh said the new software will revolutionize the police department.
"It brings all of our technological platforms into one single pane, providing the capability to provide responding officers with situational awareness of scenes before they even arrive, making for a far more efficient, effective response," he said during a presentation at the Dec. 17 City Council meeting.
The program allows the city to access a host of cameras, including body-worn, drones and traffic cameras under one system.
That platform would also allow citizens and businesses to register their cameras with the city police department and provide access to them if they wanted.
The software would also utilize AI for object detection with the ability to enter keywords like particular characteristics of a certain vehicle and locate it within the footage. Axon sales representative Andy Rolinson said the software does not have facial-recognition capabilities.
Manchester, New Hampshire police uses the software and Axon is in discussions about providing the software to both Buffalo city police and University of Buffalo police.
In a follow-up conversation, Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll said, without the company coming to the city first for approval, any sort of facial recognition wouldn't be something that could be implemented.
But, Axon's Draft One software enables an officer to upload their bodycamera video file then transcribe the audio from the video and use AI to create a first-person narrative from the transcription for a police report, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report.
The ACLU criticized the software in its report. The organization said such use is a "civil liberties and civil rights concerns," noting such concerns such as AI is "quirky and unreliable," that a police officer's memories of the event may offer another perspective of what occurred.
Coll said that officers in the Saratoga Springs department are still writing their own reports.