![\"Law](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AI-police-reports-police-8.23.26.jpeg\")
Law enforcement officers experiment with Code Four’s AI software to help analyze case materials and generate police reports. (George Cheng Photo)\u2018Behind The Eight Ball\u2019<\/p>\nWyoming police are entering uncharted territory as departments begin experimenting with artificial intelligence capable of narrating body-camera video, transcribing interviews and even writing police reports.<\/p>\n
Casper, Evanston and Sheridan are each testing pieces of that technology, bringing AI into a criminal justice system where a machine-generated sentence could eventually become part of the record used to search a home, make an arrest or prosecute a crime \u2014 before Wyoming has decided how that work should be preserved, disclosed or challenged.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy first reaction is good and bad,\u201d said Gay Woodhouse, a former assistant U.S. attorney who later became Wyoming\u2019s first female attorney general.<\/p>\n
Woodhouse remembers federal investigations when prosecutors spent weeks combing through hundreds of hours of pole-camera video trained on suspected drug houses, searching for the few moments that mattered.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe sat there and watched every one of the hundreds of hours,\u201d Woodhouse said. \u201cWe were working nights, weekends.\u201d<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence could find those moments in minutes.<\/p>\n
The harder question is what happens when it begins deciding which moments matter.<\/p>\n
Law enforcement officers experiment with Code Four’s AI software to help analyze case materials and generate police reports. (George Cheng Photo)\u2018Behind The Eight Ball\u2019<\/p>\n
Wyoming lawmakers have already begun wrestling with AI in government, although they have not written rules specifically governing AI-generated police reports.<\/p>\n
A bill introduced during the 2026 legislative session would have prohibited government agencies from using AI for certain forms of social scoring and biometric identification.\u00a0<\/p>\n
House Judiciary Committee lawmakers amended it<\/a>\u00a0to specifically exempt law enforcement uses that include \u201cinvestigating, reporting or prosecuting\u201d violations of Wyoming\u2019s criminal code.<\/p>\n The bill cleared the committee 7-1 but never reached a vote by the full House.<\/p>\n The language nevertheless put something new into Wyoming\u2019s legislative record: lawmakers were contemplating police using artificial intelligence for \u201creporting\u201d before the state had decided what should happen to the reports it produces.<\/p>\n No Wyoming law specifically requires an original AI-generated police report to survive after an officer edits it, nor does one require the finished report to disclose that a machine helped write it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re kind of behind the eight ball already, I think, on this,\u201d Woodhouse said. \u201cSo we need to get on it.\u201d<\/p>\n She believes the original AI output should be preserved along with the evidence used to produce it, giving prosecutors and defense attorneys the ability to see not only what the officer ultimately signed, but what the machine initially wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cThe main thing in criminal prosecutions is disclosure,\u201d Woodhouse said, \u201cand disclosing everything is much easier than trying to hide the ball.\u201d<\/p>\n Casper criminal defense attorney Keith Nachbar is less concerned with who does the typing than with what happens afterward.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it absolutely is uncharted territory,”\u00a0he said about having AI generate police reports.<\/p>\n Police reports have always served two purposes, he said. They create a record of what an officer says happened, and months or sometimes years later, they help that same officer remember it.<\/p>\n An officer writing his own report has to reconstruct the encounter: what he saw, what he heard, what he knew and what he is prepared to defend later under oath.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nachbar said a conscientious officer putting something on paper presumably has to think, \u201cI better make sure that this statement that I write is true.\u201d<\/p>\n A machine has no such reckoning.<\/p>\n \u201cAI isn’t going to be taking the witness stand, and AI doesn’t have to be accountable for the statements,\u201d Nachbar said.<\/p>\n An officer still assumes responsibility when he reviews and signs an AI-generated report. Nachbar worries about the small mistake that survives that review.<\/p>\n Six months later, the officer may no longer independently remember whether a suspect reached toward his waistband or into it, precisely what somebody said or where everyone was standing. He returns to the report to refresh his memory, as officers routinely do before testifying.<\/p>\n If the machine put the wrong detail there first, Nachbar said, the report can begin informing the memory it was supposed to preserve.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do you look behind the curtain and figure out what it is that AI thought about?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n Nachbar would want the untouched AI draft in discovery so he could place it beside the officer\u2019s finished report and see what changed.<\/p>\n Evanston Police Chief Mike Vranish sees the other side of the equation every time an officer sits down to write.<\/p>\n His department is testing Code Four, which can turn body-camera recordings into written narratives that officers review, correct and sign.<\/p>\n A police officer can spend a significant part of a shift at a keyboard reconstructing an encounter that just happened on the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n Detectives can spend hours stopping and starting recorded interviews to transcribe them. Vranish remembers doing that work himself during his years as an investigator.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence can do much of it in minutes.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can’t rely on AI as the end-all,\u201d Vranish said. \u201cYou put garbage in a computer, you’re going to get garbage out.\u201d<\/p>\n His officers are also learning what a body camera \u2014 and the machine watching it \u2014 cannot know.<\/p>\n A camera can record the inside of a house where a gun has been fired, but it cannot smell the gunpowder hanging in the room. It can record a suspected drunken driver but can’t smell alcohol on his breath.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those details exist only because a human officer was standing there, points out the chief.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEverything’s got to be verified and validated by an actual person,\u201d Vranish said. \u201cAnd I don’t see that ever coming to an end.\u201d<\/p>\n Evanston has not bought Code Four, and Vranish said permanent adoption would require the department to write rules for AI into its policy manual. He also said the department has no interest in concealing when the technology has been used.<\/p>\n Hallucinations<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that worries me about AI in particular is just the ability to hallucinate,\u201d Woodhouse said, referring to the term used when a system produces information that sounds plausible and authoritative but isn’t supported by the material it was given.<\/p>\n Utah police have already seen a version so ridiculous it was impossible to miss.<\/p>\n![\"Code](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AI-police-reports-pamphlet-8.23.26.jpg\")
Code Four markets itself as “The AI Detective That Never Sleeps.” (George Cheng Photo)’AI Isn’t Going To Take The Witness Stand’\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Wyoming](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AI-police-report-Code-Four-8.23.26.png\")
Wyoming police are testing using AI to write reports and analyze evidence, but the rules of how that happens haven\u2019t caught up. \u201cThe thing that worries me about AI is just the ability to hallucinate,\u201d said former Attorney General Gay Woodhouse. (Code Four)\u2018Validated By An Actual Person\u2019<\/p>\n