Lancaster County prosecutors and public defenders will soon have new artificial intelligence tools to help them sort through the growing amount of digital evidence used in criminal cases. The Lancaster County Board of Commissioners unanimously approved separate agreements Tuesday with Axon Enterprise for the County Attorney’s Office and Public Defender’s Office.
County Attorney Pat Condon said the technology will allow prosecutors to bring together evidence including police body-camera and cruiser video, surveillance footage from businesses and written reports. The system can then use artificial intelligence to search through the material. “We can take all those videos and put them in and all the reports and put them in all together and do some AI searches on that to say, you know, show us all photos of guns, show us all reports where a gun is mentioned,” Condon said.
Condon stressed that the technology will not replace attorneys reviewing the underlying evidence. He said the system can quickly point an attorney to a particular place in a video or report, but attorneys will still be expected to verify the results. “One of the things I harp on my attorneys is they got to go back and make sure that, you know, it is there where the AI says it is,” Condon said…