Note: this story was updated to add a reaction from Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos.
At least for now, the Pima County Sheriff’s Department will not be using artificial intelligence to help write police reports.
On Tuesday, county supervisors unanimously rejected an amendment to the department’s contract with Axon Enterprise that would’ve allowed the sheriff to spend $18 million on the company’s AI products.
The sheriff’s department currently buys tasers and body cameras from Axon, a Scottsdale-based policing technology company. The two parties signed a 10-year contract in 2021. The rejected amendment would have extended that contract until 2036 and given the sheriff up to $45 million in extra funds to spend on Axon products, with $18 million slated for AI tools.
Those tools include Draft One, a software that automatically generates police reports from body camera footage, often with no way to distinguish AI-generated segments from those written by humans. The software would provide “efficiency gains,” wrote Sheriff Chris Nanos in a memo.
That argument did not sway supervisors, who opposed the amendment for various reasons.
“My vote today is not a vote against the men and women in uniform,” said District 5 Supervisor Andrés Cano.
Instead, Cano said Tuesday’s vote was “about whether we lock Pima County into a broad, long-term contract out to 2036 at a time when technology, policy and risk are changing month by month.”
Axon had come to the sheriff’s department with the proposal, pushing to extend a contract that still had five years left, according to District 3 Supervisor Jennifer Allen.
“That, in and of itself, could stand alone as a concern,” she said.
Opposition to the amendment united the board’s four Democrats with its only Republican, District 4 Supervisor Steve Christy, who said the amendment didn’t “sit right” with him.
“We’re being asked to come up with another $45 million for AI and zero for the deputies,” he said.
The largest labor union within the sheriff’s department opposed the contract amendment, arguing that AI tools were not significant time-savers and that public funds were better invested in paying deputies.
Christy connected the board’s vote to larger questions about adoption of AI technology.
“What jobs will be going away with AI if we would approve this?” he asked.
Meanwhile, District 2 Supervisor Matt Heinz questioned the lack of a competitive bidding process prior to Axon’s 2021 contract with the county. He instructed county staff to explore fielding competitive bids for similar contracts in the future. The board also told staff to begin auditing instances of Axon accessing sheriff’s department data, which the company is allowed to do in some circumstances.
In an interview with AZPM News after the board's vote, Sheriff Chris Nanos said he planned to resubmit a contract extension that addressed some of the supervisors' requests, including writing protocols for scenarios when Pima County data is requested by other governmental agencies. While he didn't rule out removing Axon's AI product from his request, he said deputies liked the software during a trial period and said it would not result in any job losses.
