Las Vegas police have received funding for tech like drones, license plate readers, and more from Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz. Next on its wish list? Artificial intelligence to go through police footage.
The city’s Sheriff Kevin McMahill said on a podcast with Horowitz and partner Marc Andreessen that he wants to use AI to blur faces or obscure sensitive information from body camera footage. McMahill also said he wants to use AI to help officers sift through the reams of information they receive when they subpoena cell phone tower data during investigations. “I really believe that some of this AI here in the new future can have tremendous impact on what has caused significant challenge for me as the Sheriff,” McMahill said.
The giant Silicon Valley venture firm released the episode on Monday, just a few weeks after Read revealed that Horowitz has been financing the Vegas police department’s purchasing of a number of a16z portfolio companies’ products. Emails Read received in a public records request also showed Horowitz has helped make decisions about the rollout of some of these technologies.
The relationship startled a number of experts and advocates who follow police accountability and surveillance technology that Read 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’re not going to stop” funding purchases, Horowitz said.
“There’s no doubt about it there’ll be a slower implementation of these types of programs across the United States, they’re just not going to be able to get to them as rapidly as we are,” McMahill said. “But we’re going to prove it’s going to work, and I think more and more municipalities will find the people that are like you.”
The episode only lightly touched on how LVMPD is using some of the technologies, like drones from Skydio and license plate-reading cameras from Flock Safety, both a16z portfolio companies. Horowitz has had conversations with LVMPD about at least four others, Read revealed earlier this month. The LVMPD did not respond to a request for comment.
Andreessen was interested in what more the Silicon Valley firm’s companies can do for the department.
“Hopefully our companies will be able to come up with the ideas for technology, but what’s on your wish list for kind of pressing issues, where you’re like: ‘Wow, I wish we could do X, and we haven’t figured out how to do it yet,’” he asked McMahill.
McMahill responded by emphasizing how much AI could help the department. He said he has a unit of 12 people to deal with public records requests, and that they spend too much time watching body camera footage to make sure that faces are blurred throughout.
“That technology can’t be all that difficult to develop to get us to a place where I don’t have to have real cops doing tedious work to remove faces, addresses, names, things that were said inside of that” video, he said.
There are already other efforts underway to integrate AI into police work. One startup, Abel, raised $5 million last month to develop AI that sifts through bodycam footage to write a police report. Police tech juggernaut Axon has also released a series of AI tools, one of which identifies objects in body cam footage to expedite the redaction process.
McMahill also explained that, during investigations, LVMPD detectives will sometimes subpoena cell phone tower records in order to understand where a suspect might have been at the time of a particular crime. But the police often get back voluminous records that are hard to parse through.
“If we could get to the place where that technology is able to take that, sometimes literally, millions of cell phone numbers that were there, and sort of go through it and give us a report that says: ‘Hey, these seven telephone numbers, at the date and time that you’re looking for, were in all of 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 solve for us,” and his partner Andreessen said developing tech to scrub faces from bodycam footage “should be very easy.”
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