The Verge has investigated the growing market for artificial intelligence tools sold to American police departments, reporting from the sidelines of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Technology Conference in Fort Worth, Texas. Vendors are pitching AI as a way to automate routine but legally significant tasks, such as writing police reports and reviewing case histories, promising to free officers for more meaningful work. The trend matters because it shifts an increasing share of policing's decision-making onto algorithms, often with little independent oversight or evidence that the tools perform as advertised.

The conference showroom featured facial-recognition cameras, automated licence-plate readers, body cameras, chatbots for non-emergency 911 calls, gunshot-detection systems, drones and report-writing software, many marketed as parts of a centralised "digital brain" for allocating police resources. Even some officers, such as Brookhaven, Georgia police captain Abrem Ayana, expressed scepticism, describing much of the pitch as sales gimmicks that fail to deliver. The article notes past data-driven policing efforts, including CompStat and PredPol, which aimed to reduce bias but instead worsened existing problems, while stressing that AI-driven systems risk removing human judgement from decisions with serious consequences for people's lives.