Interest rises in AI review of Eugene police bodycam video

Discussions have begun within the Eugene Police Department about using artificial intelligence to review body-worn camera video and possibly identify objectionable remarks made by officers.

“There is a product EPD could demo and we may do that in the near future,” Melinda McLaughlin, a police spokesperson, said in an email Wednesday, June 17.

The discussions follow the May 9 resignation of a Eugene police officer, Martin Siller, after body-camera video became public, showing Siller making racist remarks.

Discussions about the AI technology will also involve the union for Eugene police officers, Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said. 

The Eugene Police Employees’ Association previously negotiated a February 2025 memorandum of understanding effective through June of next year that says: “The City and the Association agree Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not be used to initiate or investigate allegations of employee misconduct.”

Michael Klews, a Eugene police officer and president of the organization, referred questions to another EPEA leader, Matt Grose, also an EPD officer.

“At this point, I don’t have much to add, as the Chief and I have not yet had the opportunity to discuss this in detail,” Grose said in an email. Grose is the organization’s legislative chair.

“The EPEA has a long history of collaborating with command staff to evaluate, negotiate, and implement policies that ensure we serve the citizens of Eugene to the best of our abilities,” Grose said. “I expect this policy will follow that same collaborative process, and I look forward to those discussions.”

Use of body cameras

Cameras worn by Eugene police officers are not always on. 

But, by policy, they must be turned on for all types of traffic stops (including of pedestrians), “investigative encounters” with witnesses or people reporting crimes as well as suspects, when someone is detained, and when officers have “reasonable suspicion” or probable cause that someone they’re approaching is or was involved in criminal activity, among other scenarios. 

Officers, by policy, also have discretion to record other street encounters or to turn cameras on when transporting people not in police custody, for example.

“The turning on of the bodycam is not always just a manual thing,” Skinner said during a May 14 meeting of the Police Commission. “They automatically go on when certain things happen.”

The cameras, from technology supplier Axon, generally turn on when near a police car with sirens activated or when a Taser is drawn by an officer.

“That’s also, oftentimes, why we have inadvertent recordings, too,” Skinner said May 14.

The EPD policy states that officers are to upload their body-camera video at the end of each shift to make the audio and video available for departmental use.

Union bargaining

Skinner, in a June 11 interview, called it “not unusual” for a union “to say, as technology emerges … that we don’t use it indiscriminately as a quote-unquote fishing expedition for misconduct.”

He said he wasn’t aware of the intent behind the memorandum of understanding agreement, which was signed by Shawn Adams, deputy chief until his retirement at the end of last year. 

In its entirety, the approximately 70-word agreement with the EPEA states: “The City and the Association agree Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not be used to initiate or investigate allegations of employee misconduct.

“AI is an emerging technology which has the capacity to significantly speed up almost all work functions. However, both parties agree it would be inappropriate to use this technology in the administrative setting of the Office of Professional Standards.

“This MOU will expire at 2359 hours on June 30, 2027.”

Skinner spoke about how bargaining would be likely before adopting any such technology.

“We don’t think it’s an appropriate use of technology to go searching for something that isn’t already brought to our attention,” Skinner told Lookout. “I think we can get to ‘yes’ on something, because we can put safeguards around that. The union wants to know; they want the bad apples gone too.”

But with “that MOU, it would mean that we would have to have that discussion and bargain the impacts of that,” Skinner said.

McLaughlin said the Police Department does not use artificial intelligence currently for any report-writing or investigative purposes.

Skinner said the department would also follow any citywide AI policy. 

A Eugene city spokesperson in an email Thursday said an AI “policy and governance framework” for the city is being worked on by a “team of staff.” The city has issued some guidance for employees, allowing them to use a limited number of approved software tools, including MIcrosoft Copilot Chat.

Grose said the February 2025 memorandum of understanding “was created because the City of Eugene established a citywide policy regarding AI use — specifically directing employees to use Copilot rather than others like ChatGPT or Grok in order to better safeguard potentially sensitive information.”

Public discussion

The remarks made by Siller and his subsequent resignation led to intense discussions among members of Eugene’s citizen advisory boards about the department’s response.

The department hired Siller in January 1999 after he had worked as an officer in Utah.

In a Jan. 30 phone conversation about options for cruise vacation travel, Siller could be heard asking, “Which ones do the Black people go on, Carnival?” 

A person speaking on the other end of a phone conversation begins to respond, with Siller then remarking, “They can’t swim. You got to be able to swim if you go.” The person responds: “They like to just be grounded with their watermelon and fried chicken,” with the video cutting off abruptly at that point.

In a written statement May 9, Skinner said Siller used “racist and deeply offensive language.” In the statement, Skinner said the department “will continue reviewing our policies, training, supervision, and culture to ensure this kind of conduct is never tolerated inside this department.”

The Human Rights Commission, a civilian advisory board, posed questions to the department, including about “how do we more robustly audit bodycam video,” Skinner said during a June 11 meeting of the Police Commission, also a citizen advisory group.

In the last calendar year, the department collected about 20,000 hours of body-camera video, Skinner said.

“There’s no way a human being or a team of human beings could audit all that bodycam footage,” Skinner said.

He spoke to commissioners about “leveraging artificial intelligence.”

“There is a path forward with the city, as long as there is some human involvement for quality control … to be able to search for words, key phrases, those types of things,” Skinner said.

Skinner said “an interesting project would be to try and come together with the right people and determine what would those phrases or words be that we would search for that would give us a good sense that body cam is being audited successfully.”

In May, Skinner said the video of objectionable comments from Siller was “an inadvertent or unaware recording.” 

Police provided the video to a local documentarian, Tim Lewis, as part of the discovery process in a misdemeanor theft case tied to his alleged actions Jan. 30, the night of a declared riot at the Eugene Federal Building. 

Lewis released the video of the then-unidentified officer publicly on his YouTube channel, and Eugene police identified Siller by name at a press conference after his resignation.

Technology available

Existing technology in use by some police departments goes beyond identifying keywords or phrases used by officers, said Ian T. Adams, an assistant professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina.

Adams, a policing and technology researcher, has studied the outcomes of assessing officers’ professionalism through their body-camera video.

Technology systems available for sale now to police departments rate officers’ interactions with the public as subpar, professional or highly professional, for example, Adams said.

“Subpar professional is when officers are using directed profanity or threats and insults or disparaging remarks. Basically what anybody would consider unprofessional policing behavior,” Adams said.

A ‘highly professional’ rating might come from an officer “using explanatory language before taking an official action,” like writing a traffic citation, Adams said.

One such technology company is Truleo, though there are others, Adams said. 

No one tracks how many departments use such technology, said Adams, a member of the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence. The council is a nonpartisan think tank.

“I think it’s ranging from dozens to hundreds at this point,” Adams said. The Seattle Police Department initiated a trial use of Truleo technology, but the department did not continue using the technology. 

A Seattle police spokesperson in 2023 cited concerns raised by the ACLU of Washington and others about the privacy of civilians in explaining why the trial wasn’t extended. Later, published reports described the cancellation taking place after a union leader expressed unhappiness with the technology to the department’s chief when it flagged an officer mocking a woman’s death.

Adams described the guts of the technology — natural language processing —  as predating “the modern AI era,” and questioned whether officer assessment products marketed by companies like Truleo should even be called artificial intelligence. 

Adams, who has designed experiments to evaluate outcomes of the technology on officer professionalism, said he has not seen the technology result in referrals to departmental offices to open misconduct investigations.

The information instead has gone to an officer’s supervisor or to the officer directly, providing “feedback,” he said.

“The way this technology works, it flags issues. The ‘subpar professionalism’ flags, all that’s doing is, it’s putting it to a sergeant, their direct sergeant’s review, and that direct sergeant is not internal affairs,” Adams said.

As far as simply creating a list of keywords to flag, Adams said he wouldn’t consider such an approach a “good audit.”

“There’s a lot more that goes into speaking with people than simply not saying ‘f—,“ Adams said.

There may even be times when an officer uses profanity to de-escalate an encounter, Adams said.

“i think you’re hard-pressed to come up with a black-and-white list, outside of maybe some racialized words, that are absolutely prohibited. Not every ‘motherf—-‘ is crafted equally,”