“It’s kind of a nightmare,” said Dave Maass, surveillance technologies investigations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Police, who aren't specialists in AI, and aren’t going to be specialists in recognizing the problems with AI, are going to use these systems to generate language that could affect millions of people in their involvement with the criminal justice system. What could go wrong?”

News agency Reuters reported that the gun-shaped weapon uses compressed nitrogen to fire a pair of barbed darts that are connected to the taser by thin wires.

The first taser was developed in 1974 and the device has been used by law enforcement as an alternative to deadly force since the 1990s.

"It provides a ranged and less lethal force option that could reduce injuries to suspects and officers when effecting arrest without engaging in close combat through use of baton or unarmed tactics."

First, the man had already allegedly assaulted and caused hurt to an auxiliary police officer with a metal bar before the police arrived at the scene.

"In the unlikely event of a cardiac arrest, officers are first-aid-trained to manage persons suffering from a cardiac arrest prior to the arrival of emergency medical services," they told CNA.

"After repeated warnings, officers deployed the taser as their immediate priority was to prevent the subject from causing further harm to other bystanders and officers."

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For instance, last year, the police responded to the case of a 64-year-old man in Bendemeer who was wielding a knife. There were taser shots fired at the man, who still continued to charge at police officers with the knife.

Responding to queries from TODAY on Monday (June 19), the Singapore Police Force said that the police here first used a taser in 2008.

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In a video clip of the incident posted online, the man could be seen shouting at two police officers while apparently pointing a metal bar in their direction.

The police said that when officers are faced with a situation where the taser is required, they will consider "a range and combination of factors".

For the case of the 31-year-old suspect in the recent case, there had been various factors that led to the eventual use of the taser.

The taser is a conducted electrical weapon, or a stun device, that uses propelled wires or direct contact to conduct energy to affect sensory and motor functions of a person’s nervous system.

Spitzer-Williams added that Axon also ran a test where the company took existing body cam transcripts, and in each scenario only changed the suspect’s race — for example swapping out the word “white” for “Black” or “Latino” — and ran it through the AI model. In testing, the generated police reports showed no “statistically significant differences across races,” for hundreds of samples, Spitzer-Williams said.

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SINGAPORE — A 31-year-old man was tasered and then arrested by the police on June 13 after he allegedly assaulted an on-duty auxiliary police officer with a metal bar.

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On the Singapore Police Force’s website, it is stated that all cases involving the use of firearms and tasers are "reviewed thoroughly to ensure that they’re in accordance with the police’s doctrines and training".

As to what precautions had been taken in case someone was injured from a fall after being stunned by a taser, the police said that their officers were "also trained to administer first aid whenever necessary, should a subject require any immediate medical attention".

Smith acknowledged there are dangers. “When people talk about bias in AI, it really is: Is this going to exacerbate racism by taking training data that's going to treat people differently?” he told Forbes. “That was the main risk.”

Forbes reported this week that a group of cities, including Baltimore and Augusta, believe Axon’s growth has come via market abuses. In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, they claim Axon came to dominate the body cam market and then increased the prices unfairly. Axon believes the allegations are unfounded and should be dismissed.

The police said that the man refused to heed officers’ repeated instructions to stop his aggressive behaviour and chose to advance towards officers with the metal bar in hand even after their arrival.

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For instance, during an assault involving a man slashing a woman with a chopper along Beach Road last year, the police used a taser to subdue the man after he was cornered, and the safety of police officers and bystanders were not compromised.

After he moved towards the officers up a short flight of stairs, an officer was seen firing a taser at him, causing the man to land heavily on his back, before being handcuffed.

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"In situations where there is an imminent threat of grievous hurt or death present, officers may also have to take decisive action and deploy their firearms in order to stop the threat."

“When people talk about bias in AI, it really is: Is this going to exacerbate racism by taking training data that's going to treat people differently?”

Reuters also reported that Smith’s origin story, in which he was inspired to found a police tech company after some high school friends were shot and killed, was largely a myth, claiming that he wasn’t, in fact, close to the victims. He admitted to Forbes he wasn’t close to the victims, but did know them.

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In demos shown to Forbes, Spitzer-Williams uploaded sample body cam footage. In the video, an officer is talking to a bystander named Marcus at a playground, who is describing a suspect harassing a family. The man describes the suspect as wearing a green jacket, and says he’s about “my height.” The software then generates a short 5-paragraph narrative describing the situation. “Marcus stated that the incident occurred roughly 20 minutes prior to our conversation and that the suspect was last seen hiding behind the slide at the park,” reads part of the generated text. The AI model also flagged areas where the officer needed to add more context to the report, such as Marcus’ height for reference.

Spitzer-Williams said that the AI tool will come with an audit trail that lists out all the actions that any user took, so police agencies can ensure a report has been reviewed and validated. All of the information is stored and processed on Microsoft Azure cloud servers, he added.

The darts then embed in the skin, emitting a pulsed current that causes a neuromuscular response that paralyses the subject for several seconds, so that the police will have a window to subdue the subject and apply handcuffs.

Another risk of using a taser, as some TODAY readers have suggested, is the danger of the suspect falling down and injuring themselves after the initial shock.

The Business Insider news website reported that strikes from taser guns can cause severe, uncontrollable contraction of muscles, which can be very painful for the suspect or target.

Daniel Linskey, a former Boston Police Department Superintendent-in-Chief and now head of financial and risk consultancy Kroll’s Boston division, said if police are going to use artificial intelligence for drafting reports, departments will need clearly defined policies, procedures and supervision. “Make sure the audit process is real,” he said. If those rules are followed, AI could be a real time saver, Linskey added, and get more police on the street, rather than in an office doing admin.

SINGAPORE — A 31-year-old man was tasered and then arrested by the police on June 13 after he allegedly assaulted an on-duty auxiliary police officer with a metal bar.

Tuesday’s product launch comes after a year in which reports have raised questions about Axon’s company culture. Reuters reported some staff felt pressured to be tasered in front of other employees and get corporate tattoos as a way of proving their commitment to the company. “The things they were criticizing us for are generally things we are proud of,” Smith said of the culture criticisms. “Our recruiting numbers went up when they ran those recent stories.”

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The taser's common X26 model administers a shock of about 1.9 milliamperes, which is "well below" the 10 milliamps needed to cause a severe electric shock.

The reports haven’t dampened Axon’s stock, which hit a record high of over $316 per share in March. In February, it reported $1.5 billion in revenue for 2023 and a net income of $174 million.

Officers are also required to undergo annual re-certification tests and training to maintain their proficiency in using the equipment.

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However, the police in Singapore said in a response to news channel CNA last year that since its use of tasers in 2008, the deployment of the weapon by officers has not resulted in cardiac arrest or death.

These reports, though, are often used as evidence in criminal trials, and critics are concerned that relying on AI could put people at risk by depending on language models that are known to “hallucinate,” or make things up, as well as display racial bias, either blatantly or unconsciously.

Some comments on TODAY's Facebook page suggested that tasering the man as he walked up the flight of steps could have resulted in him suffering serious injury.

Axon senior principal AI product manager Noah Spitzer-Williams told Forbes that to counter racial or other biases, the company has configured its AI, based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model, so it sticks to the facts of what’s being recorded. “The simplest way to think about it is that we have turned off the creativity,” he said. “That dramatically reduces the number of hallucinations and mistakes… Everything that it's produced is just based on that transcript and that transcript alone.”

On Tuesday, Axon, the $22 billion police contractor best known for manufacturing the Taser electric weapon, launched a new tool called Draft One that it says can transcribe audio from body cameras and automatically turn it into a police report. Cops can then review the document to ensure accuracy, Axon CEO Rick Smith told Forbes. Axon claims one early tester of the tool, Fort Collins Colorado Police Department, has seen an 82% decrease in time spent writing reports. “If an officer spends half their day reporting, and we can cut that in half, we have an opportunity to potentially free up 25% of an officer's time to be back out policing,” Smith said.

Smith said Axon is recommending police don’t use the AI to write reports for incidents as serious as a police shooting, where vital information could be missed. “An officer-involved shooting is likely a scenario where it would not be used, and I'd probably advise people against it, just because there's so much complexity, the stakes are so high.” He said some early customers are only using Draft One for misdemeanours, though others are writing up “more significant incidents,” including use-of-force cases. Axon, however, won’t have control over how individual police departments use the tools.

American cops are increasingly leaning on artificial intelligence to assist with policing, from AI models that analyze criminal patterns to drones that can fly themselves. Now, a GPT-4 powered AI can do one of their less appealing jobs: filing paperwork.

These include "the proportionality of the force to be applied vis-a-vis the perceived threat posed by a subject, in addition to the safety of members of the public and fellow officers, as well as the safety of the subject on which force is to be applied".

For the specific case of this suspect, Singapore Civil Defence Force paramedics at scene attended to him before he was taken conscious to a hospital, the police added.

Axon says its AI will help get more police out of the office and on the streets. Critics worry it’ll make cops lazy and potentially introduce errors into crucial evidence.