Putting Police Body-Worn Camera Footage to Work: A Civil Liberties Evaluation of Truleo’s AI Analytics Platform

by Farhang Heydari,* Max Isaacs,* Katie Kinsey,* Barry Friedman,* Christopher Slobogin,* & Alissa Marque Heydari**

Volume 46 Issue 6

The full text of this article may be downloaded by clicking on the PDF link.

This Article summarizes findings from a civil liberties evaluation of Truleo, an AI-powered analytics platform designed to automate the review of police body-worn camera (BWC) footage. It includes a summary of how Truleo’s platform works, policy choices made by the company, and our assessment of safeguards and risks of the platform from a civil liberties perspective. This Article also offers a series of recommendations for policymakers considering the adoption of Truleo or similar technologies. These include the necessity for independent testing of claimed benefits, democratic authorization for deployment, and ongoing transparency and public input around the platform’s design and operation. Importantly, this Article argues that BWC footage should be treated as “civic data” owned by the public, not the police, to enable wider access and use for purposes such as research, oversight, and the exploration of alternative public safety approaches.

Generalizing beyond Truleo, we note that despite their cost, explosive growth, and the incredible amount of personal data they capture, BWCs are significantly underregulated by law, with many critical policy choices left to the law enforcement agencies that use the technology. As a result, the use of the technology has shifted away from its original impetus—to improve outcomes for members of the public interacting with the police and to provide transparency and accountability when things go wrong—and increasingly toward an investigative tool. But we view BWC as the largest collection of data on policing in existence, and one that has been woefully underutilized as a tool for evaluating and improving policing, thus leaving much of the value of our nation’s investment in BWCs untapped. AI technologies like Truleo can rebalance the scales by automating the review of this BWC footage, but we worry that Truleo’s full potential will never be achieved so long as police retain sole control of the data. Accordingly, we emphasize the need for proactive policymaking by legislators to ensure that emerging AI analytics technologies serve the public interest and help realize the benefits of the significant public investment in BWCs.

* Assistant Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School; Senior Advisor, Policing Project at New York University School of Law. The authors are grateful to Arnold Ventures for supporting this research and to the editors of Cardozo Law Review for their superlative editing. * Director of Technology Law & Policy, Policing Project, New York University School of Law. * Technology Policy Counsel, Policing Project, New York University School of Law. * Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor of Law, New York University School of Law; Director, Policing Project, New York University School of Law. * Milton Underwood Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. * Faculty Director, Vanderbilt Project on Prosecution Policy; Research Professor, Vanderbilt Law School.