I n Lafayette, Indiana, a small city with a population of just over 70,000, the local police force decided to try out a new AI tool sold by law enforcement tech giant Axon, the company with a $35 billion market cap best known for making the Taser. Called Form One, it promised to save officers time by listening to the audio from their body cameras, then filling out the administrative details of a police report: officers and citizens’ names, ID documentation, license plates and other vehicle information. For Lafayette’s captains who’d worked closely with Axon on previous AI projects, it seemed like a no-brainer.

But after seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette’s officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn't save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague.

Routine paperwork is the kind of simple task you’d expect an artificial intelligence model to excel at. Police officers spend as much as 15 hours a week filling out reports, per Axon data. The documents are either stored for future reference or provided to prosecutors who decide whether to pursue charges, making them a crucial part of the criminal justice system. But those reports must be accurate, and the process of editing an AI model’s work to ensure it meets that standard has become onerous for some police officers.

Axon spokesperson Victoria Keough said Form One is in early access, which is meant for agencies to provide feedback before the product is released more widely. She noted officers retain full control over the final report. Lafayette’s Sergeant Matthew Santerre confirmed the emails obtained by Forbes were from a period of testing, from officers who were explicitly asked what could be done to improve the tool. He said several issues that cops flagged were then addressed, but didn’t answer follow-up questions about what was fixed. The agency has not determined if it will use Form One longer-term.

Form One is the latest addition to Axon’s flagship AI product, called Draft One, which the company launched in 2024. While Form One fills out names and addresses, Draft One writes up what happened during an incident. Axon says it’s now in use by 600 police departments across the country and has helped write 600,000 police reports, saving an estimated 300,000 hours, according to its customer surveys.

The only data-driven research on AI-drafted police reports raises questions about how much time Axon’s AI is saving. In a study published in 2024 in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, Ian Adams, a former police officer and criminology professor at the University of South Carolina, studied the Manchester Police Department in New Hampshire’s use of Draft One. Adams analyzed time stamps for when officers started a report and when they filed it. Only some had access to the software. The study found that there was no improvement in how long it took for cops to file reports because they spent a significant amount of time editing the AI system’s work: removing irrelevant information, fixing inaccuracies and adding important facts it missed. “It was just easier to type the report themselves,” says Manchester’s Lieutenant Matthew Barter, who participated in the research.

“AI is the greatest accelerant Axon has ever had.” Axon CEO Rick Smith

They also surveyed the officers using it. Despite what the data showed, about half of Manchester’s cops believed Draft One had helped speed up report writing. “There's a definite gap between the perception and objective reality,” says Adams. Even though it was the first agency to test Axon’s Draft One, Manchester ditched it in 2024. The same year, the Anchorage Police Department in Alaska also decided to stop using it, citing zero time savings.

Axon spokesperson Alex Engel says Manchester’s study provided “an interesting historical snapshot,” but “its conclusions rely on AI-assisted narratives generated in 2024 from a single agency.” “AI capabilities and Draft One have evolved significantly in the last two years, and evaluating the quality of an older version of the product should not be generalized to how Draft One operates today across agencies,” Engel adds. There are no recent peer-reviewed studies testing if the technology has improved at writing police reports.

“AI is the greatest accelerant Axon has ever had,” CEO Rick Smith wrote in a letter to shareholders earlier this year. Form One and Draft One are part of Axon’s AI Era Plan, which gives police access to its various AI products, including real-time language translation and computer vision tools to help cops search for humans and objects in video footage. It costs $199 per officer per month. Smith says Axon booked approximately $750 million in AI Era contracts in the year after Draft One launched in late 2024, a figure that refers to the potential value of a contract over multiple years. In its most recent results from the first quarter of 2026, it said revenue from AI products grew more than 700% year-over-year. The company has not released actual sales figures detailing how much its AI products are bringing in.

Many cops report seeing benefits from using AI beyond time savings. Greg Daly, chief of the Avon Police Department in Colorado, is using a combination of Draft One and two other products from startups Truleo and Code Four. He says a suite of AI tools has eased the administrative burden of crafting a report. “You can come back at the end of a shift, and you could have five or six reports to do,” Daly says. “These reports have to be submitted to the DA’s office, and that can be very stressful... To come into the station and have draft reports or the skeleton of a report to work on is extremely helpful and has a very beneficial mental health aspect.”

“It's a type of error that can really challenge an officer's credibility when they're on the stand.” Daniel Clark, King County prosecutor

But leaning on AI too heavily risks making officers complacent. Per a March 2025 email obtained by Forbes , Axon asked the Lafayette Police Department if it could use some quotes for Draft One promotional material. That included one from an officer who, in an interview with Axon’s comms team, said he wrote reports at home “because I don’t have time to finish in the office… Tonight I’m going to spend time with my family instead of writing reports.” Lafayette leadership wasn’t happy with the quote and asked Axon to keep it out of its press release. The officer’s statement was “a great example of pure laziness,” wrote one sergeant.

Concerns around AI leading to sloppiness have led some jurisdictions to say they won’t accept AI-generated reports as evidence. In 2024, the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office in King County, Washington, informed law enforcement agencies it would not accept reports written with the help of AI because of hallucinations. Daniel Clark, King County prosecutor, tells Forbes that he’s seen AI getting names of witnesses and officers wrong, or putting officers at the scene when they were simply on the radio. “It's a type of error that can really challenge an officer's credibility when they're on the stand, and then that puts the officer at risk of being either called lazy, sloppy or dishonest,” Clark says. “None of those are good options.”

Multiple startups have launched their own versions of Axon’s Draft One tool. Y Combinator alum Abel Police, which has raised $5 million, looks at bodycam footage as well as audio. Founder and CEO Daniel Francis says his tool can describe a person’s emotion, rough age and ethnicity based on such video. Code Four, another Y Combinator startup founded by teenage MIT dropouts George Cheng and Dylan Nguyen, also sells a similar tool for cops and has raised $2.5 million in funding. But its tech hooks up the AI-generated reports to other police datasets so it can quickly search across them for investigative leads. That opens up the potential for AI to generate a report and then make connections between someone present at an incident and any previous run-ins with the police.

“This is making what was supposed to be an accountability mechanism another tool of public surveillance.” Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center

Anthony Tassone, CEO of police tech provider Truleo, believes AI-generated reports are going to “hurt policing.” AI, whether looking through a lens or listening through a mic, does not have the context and critical thinking of a human officer, he says. AI-crafted drafts are “worse than from starting [with] a blank page, because now you've given police this corrupted report.” Axon and Abel “sold police a bunch of bullshit,” he says.

Truleo is one of a handful of companies taking a different approach: Its AI tool doesn’t write any of the narrative like Draft One does, but acts more like an assistant in the report-writing process. The officer either begins writing or narrating the report, and the AI edits and formats it correctly while flagging any facts cops might have missed from the body camera footage. Manchester PD is currently trialing one such AI agent from California-based startup PoliceNarratives.AI. Though it’s yet to complete its study on the tool’s efficacy, Barter says it looks “promising.”

Integrating AI with body cameras is a core feature of all these tools. But that also means that AI is now detailing citizens’ most distressing and private moments, even when they’re innocent parties and minors. A cache of AI-generated police reports obtained by Forbes from the Richmond Police Department in California includes numerous callouts to schools where bullying of both pupils and teachers took place, but no crime occurred, and death by natural causes, as well as graphic descriptions of sexual assaults.

“This is making what was supposed to be an accountability mechanism another tool of public surveillance,” says Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center and director of its AI and Human Rights Program.

In one report from the Richmond Police files, the AI relayed an event in which a teenage student typed out a quote from the TV cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants on his laptop: “Gary, there's a bomb strapped to my chest!” A classmate misunderstood the line as a potential threat and informed school staff, who called in the cops. The police officer arrived and swiftly determined it was all a misunderstanding. But the AI won’t forget. Per the report, the incident would be “retained for future pattern tracking.”