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Las Vegas Police have received funding for technology like drones, license plate readers and more from Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz. Next on her wish list? Artificial intelligence for browsing police footage.
Sheriff Kevin McMahill said Podcast with Horowitz and partner Marc Andreessen He wants to use artificial intelligence to blur faces or hide sensitive information from body camera footage. McMahill also said he wants to use artificial intelligence to help officers sift through large amounts of information they receive when they request cell phone tower data during investigations. “I really believe that some of this artificial intelligence here in the new future could have a tremendous impact on what has caused a huge challenge for me as sheriff,” McMahill said.
The Silicon Valley venture giant released the episode on Monday, just a few weeks after TechCrunch revealed that Horowitz was financing the Vegas Police Department’s purchase of a number of the wallet company’s a16z products. Emails received by TechCrunch in a public records request also showed that Horowitz helped make decisions about rolling out some of these technologies.
The relationship stunned a number of experts and advocates who follow police accountability and surveillance technology that TechCrunch spoke to. But Horowitz and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) only intend to continue and deepen that relationship, according to the podcast episode.
“We will not stop” financing purchases, Horowitz said.
“There’s no doubt that there will be slower implementation of this type of program across the United States, but they won’t be able to get there as quickly as we are,” McMahill said. “But we will prove that it will work, and I believe that more and more municipalities will find people like you.”
The episode only touched slightly on how LVMPD uses some technology, such as drones from Skydio and license plate reading cameras from Flock Safety, both from a16z group companies. Horowitz has been in talks with the LVMPD about at least four others, TechCrunch revealed earlier this month. LVMPD did not respond to a request for comment.
Andreessen was interested in what Silicon Valley companies could do for the department.
“We hope our companies can come up with ideas for technology, but what’s on your wish list for kind of a pressing issue, where you say, ‘Great, I wish we could do McMahill.
McMahill responded by emphasizing how much AI can help the department. He said he has a 12-person unit that handles public records requests, and they spend a lot of time watching body camera footage to make sure faces aren’t blurred all the time.
“It couldn’t be that difficult to develop this technology to get us to a place where I don’t need to have real cops doing the hard work of removing faces and addresses and names and things that were said within that video,” he said.
There are already other efforts underway to integrate artificial intelligence into policing. One startup, Abel, raised $5 million last month to develop artificial intelligence that sifts through body camera footage to write a police report. The police technology juggernaut Axon has also been released A series of artificial intelligence tools, One of them identifies objects in body camera footage to speed up the retouching process.
McMahill also explained that during investigations, LVMPD investigators sometimes subpoena cell phone tower logs in order to understand where a suspect may be at the time of a particular crime. But police often recover voluminous records that are difficult to analyze.
“If we can get to a place where this technology is able to take that, sometimes literally, millions of cell phone numbers that were there, and kind of go through that and give us a report that says, ‘Hey, these seven phone numbers,’ on the date and time that Looking for it, you’re in all these specific locations,” it helps us develop leads,” he said.
In response, Horowitz said applying AI to cell phone tower data would be “a very easy solution for us,” and his partner Andreessen said developing technology to scan faces from body camera footage “should be very easy.”
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