Las Vegas Sheriff tells a16z partners what's next on his wish list: AI for body cameras

Las Vegas police receive funding from Andreessen Horowitz partner for technology like drones, license plate readers and more Ben Horowitz. Next on the wish list? Artificial intelligence will examine police footage

City Sheriff Kevin McMahill said: A podcast with Horowitz and partner Marc Andreessen He said he wants to use artificial intelligence to blur faces or hide sensitive information in body camera footage. McMahill also said he wants to use artificial intelligence to help officers sift through the reams of information they receive when they subpoena cell phone tower data during investigations. “I truly believe that some of the AI here in the new future could have a tremendous impact on what is causing significant challenges for me as Sheriff,” McMahill said.

The giant Silicon Valley startup released the episode on Monday, just a few weeks later. TechCrunch revealed He said Horowitz financed the Vegas police department’s purchase of the products of a number of a16z portfolio companies. Emails obtained by TechCrunch through a public records request also showed that Horowitz helped make decisions about rolling out some of these technologies.

This relationship surprised some experts and advocates who follow police accountability and surveillance technology TechCrunch spoke with. But according to the podcast episode, Horowitz and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) only intend to maintain and deepen that relationship.

“We will not stop” fund purchases, Horowitz said.

“There’s no doubt that these types of programs will be slower to roll out in the United States, but they won’t be able to get to them as quickly as we are,” McMahill said. “But we will prove that it works, and I think more and more municipalities will find people like you.”

The episode touched only lightly on how LVMPD uses some technologies, such as drones from Skydio and license plate reading cameras from Flock Safety, both a16z portfolio companies. TechCrunch revealed earlier this month that Horowitz had spoken to LVMPD about at least four other people. LVMPD did not respond to a request for comment.

Andreessen was interested in what more the Silicon Valley firm’s companies could do for the department.

“Hopefully our companies can come up with ideas for technology, but what’s on your wish list for pressing problems and saying, ‘Wow, I wish we could do X and we haven’t figured it out yet. We don’t know how to do it yet,'” McMahill asked.

McMahill responded by highlighting how much AI can help the department. He said he has a 12-person unit that handles public records requests and that they spend a lot of time watching body camera footage to make sure faces are completely blurred.

“It can’t be that hard to develop this technology to get us to a place where I don’t need real cops to do the tedious work of deleting faces, addresses, names, and things that are said in that video,” he said. in question.

There are already other efforts to integrate AI into police work. A beginning, AbelIt raised $5 million last month to develop artificial intelligence that scans body camera footage to write police reports. Police tech juggernaut Axon also released a set of artificial intelligence tools, One of these identifies objects in body camera footage to speed up the redaction process.

McMahill also explained that during investigations, LVMPD detectives will sometimes subpoena cell tower recordings to understand where the suspect may have been at the time a particular crime was committed. But police often recover large amounts of records that are difficult to decipher.

“If we could get to the point where this technology could take literally millions of cell phone numbers that are out there, sometimes, and kind of go through it and give us a report that tells us, ‘Hey, these seven phone numbers, we were at all of these specific locations on the date and time you called,’ which is “It helps us develop leads,” he said.

In response, Horowitz said applying AI to cell tower data would be “a very easy solution for us,” and his partner Andreessen said developing technology to scrub faces from body camera footage “should be very easy.”