The Frog Prince in Blue: How an AI “Transformed” a Utah Police Officer
The police department of Heber City, Utah, encountered a plot twist worthy of a Hollywood fantasy while testing a new AI assistant. The software for automatic report writing, after analyzing footage from an officer’s body camera, confidently reported on… his transformation into a frog. The document, in black and white (or rather, green on swampy), stated that the law enforcement officer had undergone an animated metamorphosis.
The culprit wasn’t an evil wizard, but the harmless Disney cartoon “The Princess and the Frog” playing in the background. The artificial intelligence, listening to dialogues about kisses and enchantments, drew the only logical conclusion from its point of view: the officer had gone on duty with a croak.
“At that moment, we realized that AI can write not only reports but also fairy tales. Good thing it was a frog and not Godzilla,” Sergeant Nick Keel humorously noted in an interview with Fox 13.
The department was “tormenting” itself with a choice between two digital candidates: Draft One from Axon and Code Four. The “amphibian thriller” is the exclusive creation of Draft One, which uses a sophisticated GPT-4 Turbo neural network to turn a cop’s workday into text. The opportunity to have such a dreamer on the team will cost about $65–70 per month per officer.
Its competitor, Code Four, approaches the matter more boringly but more thoroughly: it not only writes but also adds timestamps and even analyzes whether a suspect was angry or speaking sarcastically. Both are polyglots — they understand English and Spanish. Journalists at a Code Four demonstration watched as the AI composed a report on a training traffic stop in a matter of minutes. True, the officer had to remove a couple of the system’s “assumptions,” but overall — it was almost a detective story, not a document.
Personally, Sergeant Keel’s new “digital intern” saves him a ton of time — a whole 6-8 hours a week that used to be spent on boring event descriptions. “I’m far from an IT guru, but this thing works so simply that even my cat could handle it. If he were hired by the police,” joked the sergeant.
The Code Four pilot period will end soon, and the department will have to decide whom to keep: the “storyteller” Draft One or the “analyst” Code Four.
The moral of this fable (or report?) is this:
As long as AI hasn’t learned to distinguish cartoons from reality or a joke from a confession, the final word must remain with a human. Report verification isn’t just a formality. It’s the only way to make sure that talking frogs, princes, and other magical personalities haven’t taken up residence in the paperwork. The technology is an excellent assistant, but for now, the main author must remain the officer with his healthy skepticism and sense of humor.