AI vs. Law Enforcement: Deepfakes, Doxing & Deception

So when we were talking, uh, pre-production, Braden, uh, you made an interesting comparison between law enforcement's, uh, current AI awareness and then the resistance, uh, of to social media over the last 15 years.

And, and can you walk us through that, that history and, and how you see it repeating itself in, in some of the departments you're behind?

Yeah, so, so back in the early 2010s, um, the, uh, law enforcement, um, had generally taken the position of no comment on active investigations and not wanting to engage in, um, a lot of the social media stuff.

And we...

It was kind of a, it was the way that things had been.

Um, the fire service was a little bit quicker, um, to start getting onto social media and engaging in that, in that medium there.

Um, and then you watch the big push with BLM that happened, um, politically, and law enforcement and law enforcement associations were kind of on their heels trying to respond to this audience of people in a, in a group that they hadn't really engaged with before.

And so there was a lot of missteps, uh, a lot of organizations and a lot of great people who tried really hard to get in really early, um, but, but as a whole, it's been really difficult.

But in the last five or six years, we've seen a big shift.

Um, and I think you've watched departments, and it's been a lot of, you know, chief-led stuff too, uh, top-down said, "Hey, we need to be more, um, upfront.

We need to be more aggressive.

We need to not let the story kind of rumor mill for too long." Um, you know, I've been teaching for a while in communications.

I've taught crisis communications, um, bad days and good days, and I always tell people, you know, in the absence of the truth, the rumors are the facts.

So if, if you're not in there, the, whatever they're saying about you, whether it's true or not, is all that people are hearing.

And if, even if they don't believe it the first time, by the fifth or sixth or seventh or tenth time, you know, and you've been silent, what else are they gonna think? And, and so, you know, we've watched, um, public safety, I think, as a whole try to adapt.

And, and there was a period of time too back in the day where legally there were things law enforcement could not say about active investigations.

So laws had to catch up, policies had to catch up, leadership had to catch up.

It wasn't just an, an overnight thing.

And now with AI, we're kind of watching it all happen again.

And I think public safety, both the fire service, law enforcement, EMS, are all kind of caught trying to figure out how do we adapt these technologies.

And there's, I think, such a big gap between what AI truly is, what we think it's going to be in 24 months, which is an eternity in this con- moment of technological boom, and where we can fit those things in to make the world a better place, but also protect us from the known bad actors that are already kinda starting to fall out of the woodwork.

It sounded pretty early, Braden, like you, you saw the gap between the people that are using this communication to run towards danger to people that are lobbying for it.

So you made that direct, you know, transition there.

It sounds like you early, you realized early on that there was a gap in that communication, so now you're lobbying for that communication.

Is there...