David Lawrence, who dropped out of Harvard Law after an on-campus shooting involving a police officer, has raised $6 million to launch Blue Voice out of stealth, a Boston-based AI startup that gives police officers real-time guidance on department policy and law while in the field. The tool aims to address the fact that officers often make split-second decisions based on memory of thousands of pages of rules, protocols and local ordinances, with existing options—consulting a lengthy manual, waking a supervisor, or using generic AI tools prone to errors—proving too slow or unreliable.

The funding round was led by SignalFire and Las Olas VC, and Blue Voice is co-founded by Lawrence alongside Amit Patankar, a former Google engineer, and Michael Gropman, a retired Boston police deputy chief. The platform, likened to legal AI tool Harvey, is now used daily by officers at 225 county agencies across 25 states, with the customer base growing elevenfold over the past year; it answers a question roughly every minute and points officers to original regulations rather than generating standalone answers. Lawrence cites examples including a rookie officer using the app to confirm grounds to intervene in a suspected child enticement case, and hopes the tool shows that AI can improve public safety without compromising civil rights, at a time when police AI use, such as Flock Safety's surveillance systems, faces growing scrutiny.