The USC police department is preparing its officers for more accountable interactions with AI body cameras following the initial announcement of its partnership with Truleo.
USC will be the first campus in the state to utilize AI body cameras on its officers. While the announcement broke in early September, the department is still in the early stages of training its officers with Truleo as USC Police Major TJ Geary said. The new body cameras will allow USCPD supervisors to find relevant footage quicker and observe the professionalism of its officers.
“We have not actually fully integrated everything,” Geary said. “We're still in a preparatory phase where they're doing voice printing and some other preliminary things required for the AI to understand that this is the officer speaking versus a violator on a traffic stop.”
Truleo is a company that specializes in providing body cameras with AI and maintaining its software. According to its website, the company’s intention with its body cameras, like cameras without AI technology, is to keep officers accountable while they work. By incorporating AI, departments will have an easier time “surfacing positive moments” of officers working, aiding police union standards of behavior and preventing supervisors from wasting their time combing through hours of irrelevant footage.
“We're about to roll out kind of a training phase where Truleo will come in and speak with the officers and kind of walk through the system,” Geary said. “There are features that are built in there specifically where supervisors can get feedback on their officers and use it as a coaching tool.”
Geary said USC’s police department was close to being the first in the state to utilize this technology at all. The department was first introduced to the concept of AI body cameras at a conference with the FBI National Academy in 2022. Due to troubles with vendors, the campus could not adopt the technology as quickly as it had hoped.
“It took us a little over two years to really get to the point that we could adopt this because of the constraints of our body camera systems, but we've been interested in it for quite a while,” Geary said. “One of our core values is accountability. We have a long history of being an agency that always looks for ways that we can improve.”
USC’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice played a major role in evaluating AI body cameras. Two professors from the department engaged with Truleo firsthand. Criminology and Criminal Justice professor Geoff Alpert and assistant professor Ian Adams led a six-month study with Truleo, the Aurora Police Department in Colorado and the Richland County Sheriff's Department in Columbia. Working with Associate Professor Kyle McLean from Clemson University, they found that Truleo was effective in trials.
The choice in observing Aurora Police Department and Richland County Sheriff’s Department was intentional, Adams said. Both agencies had different attitudes in behavior, their work and willingness to try Truleo. In Aurora, officers weren’t as open to engaging with the new tool. In Richland, officers were more positive about having information on how to improve.
The Aurora Police Department saw a 67% reduction in substandard professionalism and 57% fewer unprofessional interactions. The Richland County Sheriff’s Office saw similar results, with the Truleo system seeing double the amount of highly professional police conduct.
“In Aurora, for example, it reduced that subprofessional level quite substantially, but it didn't really improve the rates of highly professional police conduct,” Adams said. “Then in Richland we had sort of the opposite. We had a strong increase in the level of highly professional ratings, but nothing really significant happening.”
With the introduction of AI body cameras on campus, there has been confusion about how they work and what this will mean for students. Adams said the AI software being used relies primarily on voice transcription, allowing supervisors to find the relevant parts of the footage easily.
“We talk about it as if it's body camera review, like the AI is taking a look at the actual footage,” Adams said. “It's simply taking a look at the actual transcript from the audio only of the body-worn camera video.”
Adams said the software isn’t intended to breach the privacy of the officers and citizens it may capture on tape. There are protections built within the Truleo technology that prevent most sensitive information from being caught. The AI transcript will automatically redact any personal identifiable information obtained on camera within the officer's speech and will focus primarily on the officer's words and behavior. Privacy concerns have followed the invention of police body cameras long before AI was included.
“I think it's undeniable that some officers will feel this is an infringement in their workplace, and this is very similar to the feedback that officers gave at the beginning of the body-worn camera adoption phase, which began in about late 2014,” Adams said. “People that haven't followed this closely might assume that body cameras have always been around, but they haven't. They've only been around for about 10 years in the United States.”
Adams said feedback has still been mixed due to the tool’s novelty. Fourth-year criminology student Logan Miller said he is optimistic about the department’s inclusion of AI on campus, as it is a tool to allow improvements in accountability and bias.
“A lot of that information goes without review,” Miller said. “I think because if you're leaving it to AI, obviously AI isn't going to have the same biases that a person like you or I might may have.”
Miller said there is a need for trustworthiness between the university’s officers and the students at the university. With Truleo's intentions of improving police interactions, these interactions will be on record for civilian protection.
“We're all adults, but we just want to make sure that the police officers are doing their job, that they are making students feel comfortable because at the end of the day, they are supposed to be a resource for students,” Miller said.
Some have approached Adams and Geary, they said, with more reservations about AI technology. The concern isn’t stopping the USC Police Department from looking at ways to upgrade safety with technology. Adams said he agrees that AI will only grow, prioritizing the need to interact with it.
“I know that they are unfamiliar for a lot of my colleagues, the professors, but at the end of the day, I think you have to engage with them, because they're not going away,” Adams said. “If anything, the adoption curve and the efficiency curves are going to increase, so better to get it on the ground floor, figure out how to use these types of tools now in the relatively safe place of college.”