Jim Bueermann: Rethinking Police Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

The CopDoc Podcast - Episode 150

Artificial intelligence isn't just coming to policing—it's already here, transforming everything from report writing to emergency response. In this forward-looking conversation, Jim Bierman, former Chief of Redlands, California and current president of the Future Policing Institute, delivers a wake-up call for law enforcement leaders about AI's revolutionary impact.

"AI is going to be the most disruptive technology human beings have ever invented—the most disruptive phenomena since humans figured out how to harness fire," Bierman warns. The pace of AI development far outstrips our legislative ability to regulate it or our practitioners' understanding of its capabilities. Yet most police departments lack basic policies or training for officers already using tools like ChatGPT.

Bierman speaks from extensive experience, having led innovation initiatives and later serving as president of the National Police Foundation (now National Policing Institute). He describes how AI applications are already transforming policing—from Everett, Washington's automated call-taking system to drones serving as first responders, providing crucial situational awareness before officers arrive.

The podcast explores how America's 18,000 different law enforcement agencies create a fragmented landscape where knowledge-sharing becomes critical. With ongoing staffing shortages and rising costs, departments must find innovative approaches to maintain service levels. AI offers solutions but requires thoughtful implementation guided by clear policies and training.

Perhaps most compelling is Bierman's challenge to police leaders: "The singular responsibility of police leaders today is to prepare their organizations for an increasingly uncertain future, long after they have left the agency." This requires dedicating time to strategic thinking despite the constant "spot fires" of daily crises.

For anyone in law enforcement leadership, this conversation provides both practical guidance and inspiration to embrace technological change while preserving policing's human dimension. Visit futurepolicinginstitute.org to access resources, including model AI policies, research summaries, and more.

Contact us: copdoc.podcast@gmail.com

Website: www.copdocpodcast.com

If you'd like to arrange for facilitated training, or consulting, or talk about steps you might take to improve your leadership and help in your quest for promotion, contact Steve at stephen.morreale@gmail.com

Chapters

• 0:31 Episode Introduction
• 1:28 Innovation in Policing
• 5:08 Diversity of American Policing
• 8:58 AI as a Revolutionary Technology
• 14:33 Practical Applications of AI in Policing
• 20:50 Future of Robotics and Policing
• 28:16 Future Policing Institute's Mission
• 38:10 Knowledge Management in Policing
• 49:10 Closing Thoughts and Resources

Transcript

Intro Outro Announcement

00:02

Welcome to the CopDoc Podcast. This podcast explores police leadership issues and innovative ideas. The CopDoc shares thoughts and ideas as he talks with leaders in policing communities, academia and other government agencies. And now please join Dr Steve Morreale and industry thought leaders as they share their insights and experience on the Cop Doc Podcast. 

Steve Morreale Host

00:31

Hey everybody, Steve Morreale, coming to you live from South Carolina. We're headed over to the West Coast, to an area near Southern California, to talk to Jim Bierman. Jim is the former chief of Redlands, California. He was active with the National Institute of Justice, a fellow there for a while and went on to be the president of the National Police Foundation, now the National Police Institute. He is still active. I had the pleasure of bringing him into a command college at Liberty University a few weeks ago where he talked about the future of policing, and he is now the president of Policing Future Institute. So I wanted to say hello to Jim. Unfortunately, we had a little mess up with audio, so the first part of this is missing, which is his introduction. My apologies for that, but we get into our discussion with Jim on any number of things, including, of course, the current state of policing and the future of policing. So here is Jim Bierman. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

01:28

Every day, build a better mousetrap called the police department. The world changes constantly. In fact, change may be the only constant in our lives, and not trying to adapt to this rapidly changing world means that you are not giving the taxpayer the return on their investment in policing that I think you should. Policing is not like the private sector, where people make voluntary, conscious decisions to purchase goods or services. We give our quote-unquote donation in the form of taxes, right, property taxes, sales taxes that fund entities like policing, and policing is monopolistic. When you call 911, you don't get a voicemail that says press one for the state police, press two for the sheriff's department, press three for this police department or the other. You get whoever's going to show up, and that can be problematic, has a tendency, if you're not careful, to build in complacency, not only at the leadership level but the organizational level. I happen to have grown up in the city in which I was a cop and then the police chief for a long time, and that probably gave me the ability to do some things that, if I was talking to a career coach might say that's a bit risky. Bierman, you might want to maybe slow that one down a little bit, but I believe that I had enough connections and currency in my community that people would believe that my heart was in the right place when we were trying something new. That people would believe that my heart was in the right place when we were trying something new, but I openly talked about this both internally in the organization and externally, that we are going to innovate because that's what you as the taxpayer deserve and, from a policing standpoint, that's what we're obligated to deliver Every day is to think differently about it. There are other issues related to that that we could talk about, but every organization has a tolerance for change and you have to be careful about that, because my tolerance for change was much higher than the organization. So I'm sure a couple of times I exceeded the organizational tolerance and we had to have conversation. I developed the capacity to apologize to my people a lot very quickly because I was asking them to try these different things, and early on I learned that if I could not explain it adequately to first the command staff or the union president or my assistant or records clerks or whatever, then I probably should be very careful about and maybe even rethink what we were doing. But I got pretty good at being able to define in that way, because innovation can carry with it a cost. 

I led the police department through a variety of fiscal environments. Sometimes we had money, sometimes we had no money. In fact, toward the end of my career we're in the recession 2007 and 8, lost a third of the department. So it was problematic and we had to come up with other ways of trying to get to the same outcomes. But early on I decided that if I was going to do some of these things and if I was going to walk the talk I was constantly chattering about with being a good steward of the public tax dollar, then I needed to go find funding sources that were outside my city's general fund and that came in the form of federal grants and federal opportunities to be pilot sites or test sites for things, and so we raised millions of dollars doing this, but that meant I spent a lot of time on planes going from the West Coast to the East Coast. The unintended benefit of all of that was that I got out of the Southern California mindset of policing and out of my own agency mindset of policing. My community continues to be generally very supportive of policing and see policing in different places. That ultimately led to my, when I retired, working for NIJ for a short period of time at the Department of Justice and then spending six years as the president of the National Police Foundation, now the National Policing Institute, and that work gave me a chance to see both international policing and policing all across this country. 

04:48

The challenge when you think about policing in this country is that in many ways and I spend a lot of time trying to explain this to people who are not in the business or policing, people who have not had an opportunity to travel around the country or see different models of policing is that policing in the United States is not monolithic, it's not homogeneous in many ways and there is no national coherence around policing. We've got 18,000 different agencies and they do them differently. So when you think about policing, you can stratify that group of this thing called policing in multiple ways. Right, there's rural, suburban and urban policing. There's policing at the state level, county level, city level, federal policing. Right, big agencies, midsize agencies and small agencies, and while there are some commonalities among those things, there are also significant differences. Then when you begin to think about the differences in this country by region or along political lines, then you stratify it even more right. Southern policing, policing in the Southeast part of the United States might be different than the Northwest, or the Midwest might be different than Southern California. Inside California alone, policing in the far northern part of the state is very rural. Northern California policing is different from Southern California policing. 

05:56

I think in many ways the closest you can get to kind of a coherence around this is probably at the state level. We have 50 different models of how policing should be done. I'm not talking about turn on the radio or use your gun or put handcuffs on people. I'm talking about more kind of the philosophical orientation about what is the purpose of policing, and in some places it's clearly about law enforcement and in other places it's really more about problem solving or maintaining the peace or whatever Right so and that can be a bit confusing for people who move from one part of the country to another and they're exposed to something different. 

06:27

But on a personal level, that experience for me taught me a lot about how great policing is, and I think this is why your podcast is so important and why I think what we're trying to do at the Future Policing Institute is to share information about the really good policing that's done in different parts of this country and displacing those around the country or by size. A couple of fellows of the institute that run very, very large state policing organizations and they have a very distinct way of looking at things because of the scale of what they're doing and the scope of what they're responsible for. And how do I take those ideas and scale them down to, let's say, Redlands PD, that's got 100 cops in a community of 80,000, let's say, or the other way around, right, how do you displace those concepts in either by size, type of agency or region? 

Steve Morreale Host

07:13

In some ways, we're talking to Jim Bierman, and he is now the president of the Future Policing Institute. 

07:18

We're talking to him from the East Coast over to the West Coast and we think about the future. And what you're saying is here is a thing and this is not meant to be pejorative, I don't mean to take a swipe, but so many police officers that are hired are hired, stay in one place, maybe like yourself, born there, raised there and will die there and work there, and that, if you do not allow yourself to take the blinders off, you're looking at the world through a microscope rather than a macroscope, if you know what I'm saying. And there's a narrow view until such time as you begin to say what are they doing there? What are they doing there? How could that work for us? What are we doing well? What can we do better? One of the things that you talked about when we had you at the command college was about the future and AI and how important AI is. I really want to take you down that road because so few people talk about that, the impact it has now and it will in the future. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

08:16

Well, I guarantee you that we're all going to be talking about it very soon, if, in many places, we're not already doing it. This is my own personal perspective, but AI, I think, is going to prove to be the most disruptive technology human beings have ever invented the most disruptive and that can be good or bad, by the way, but the most disruptive phenomena since Manon figured out how to harness fire. It is sometimes difficult for me, and I'm not an expert on AI, but I spend a lot of time focusing on it and talking about it and playing with it, and it is frequently difficult for me even to get my head around how fast this is evolving. The pace of development in AI far, far outstrips the legislative ability to regulate it or for us, as current or former practitioners, to really understand the implications of what it's capable of and where it's going. 

Steve Morreale Host

09:03

I'll interrupt you for a moment because I'm going to tell you something that happened with this meeting here. In the past, I've used Otter, which sort of keeps notes, but what happened is it looks like I'm using Zoom. It looks like Zoom has this read AI and I allowed it in. It's taking meeting notes, and so what that does is it allows me to focus on your words and not worry about taking notes, because so think about the change there that it's capturing. I can take those notes. I can say give me the themes, because that's what you were talking about a minute ago. What are the themes of improvement? What are the themes of improving culture? What are the themes? Are there that police are using to improve communications inside and outside, to improve service? I mean, you just go on and on and on. How can we use it to improve training? I mean, I want to continue with this conversation but AI is helping us right now. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

09:51

So the vista of benefit for AI, I think, is infinite. 

09:55

It has benefits beyond what most of us can comprehend at this moment, and I'm all for that. I use it all the time the idea of creating a toolbox of AI tools that you should use in policing, to increase your productivity, et cetera. I also think there's some pitfalls we can talk about, but one of the things you'll hear consistently about the theorists around AI people who are big thinkers about where AI is going is how, in their belief, we are going to, as humans in the relatively near future, so many people will be and here's the optimistic view of this unburdened by the labors of common work, and that we will be able to realize a greater abundance of life, spend time doing what we want to do rather than what we have to do. And you'll hear people talk about this idea of a universal basic income as connected to that idea that we would free people up to have a more fulfilling life. There's lots of challenges with that right and the implementation of that, but I think this is where this is going, because when you look at the evolution today of AI and robotics, for instance, there's a fast food restaurant in my town that I've been going to since it opened up I don't know, probably been going there 30 years at least in my town that I've been going to since it opened up. I don't know, probably been going there 30 years at least. 

11:06

The other day I went through there and I spent a lot of time listening to AI generated voices, so I'm getting pretty good at identifying them. And I'm ordering in the drive-thru and I say to myself I think I'm talking to a machine, I don't think I'm actually talking to somebody. So I start to ask it some questions about, even though I know that this particular meal item I have onions on it and pickles and ketchup or whatever I start asking it questions about that and to test this, and it answers all those questions. So then I finish my order, I get up to the window and look in the window and again, I've been going this place forever. There used to be a couple of people at the counter and then somebody packaging the food and doing it, and then the person at the window in this instance there's only one person and it happens to be one of the managers and I say, was I just talking to the machine? And she says yeah, and I said, well, where are the other people? She said, well, they're not here. There's me and the guy in the back who's making the stuff and that's it, or I guess they had one other guy that did the cleaning of the work that's involved in there. 

12:07

At least out in this part of the country, it's very clear that these fast food restaurants are trying to get you not to come into the lobby. They want you to go through the drive-thru because that's where they have the least amount of personnel costs. But you can see where the machines could produce the hamburgers and the French fries better than human beings. They can have mechanical delivery systems and, as we move away from cash, there are multiple restaurants in my town here that do not take cash. You have to use a credit card, or there are several of them that are trying to get you to use their app. Right, so it's all automated. So you can envision I use the app to order it, I drive through and the machines hand me the stuff. I never talk to anybody, or maybe there's just one person who's handing me the food, because we still are tied to this human. 

Steve Morreale Host

12:48

So let me think about that and let's talk about. We're talking about fast food, but again and we said this when we talked earlier and that is, it is almost similar to the military and the driving down of technology developed for the military into the police, and it's the same with AI, that business is doing it and that it could be a time saver for automated report taking in some certain circumstances, in the future Well or non-emergency call takers, right. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

13:16

So policing has staffing challenges, right? I think everybody's talking about this and my policing career began in the late 70s and I can tell you that we've never had enough cops and enough people and we probably never will, right? So I am frequently telling police embrace the suck, you're never going to have enough people. So just get over that and move forward and try to figure out how to make it work. But policing very much is the recipient of the transfer of technology, frequently from the military, right? Whether it's radios or computer systems or the private sector. So even though I went on a bit about the fast food thing, because we can all relate to that Everett Washington, for instance, already has an automated call-taking system that's run by an AI. 

13:57

So when you call a non-emergency number, you are not I haven't tested this yet, but one of my fellows works there and was telling me about this the other day that you support. You are almost always either A talking to a machine, at least at first, or you're talking to somebody at a call center in some other country. But soon those call centers will go away as the machines get smarter and smarter. If you think about it from a customer service standpoint. If you can get performance level up to where you want, it does make a lot more sense in some ways. Machines never have an attitude, they never cop an attitude. They're never pissed off at people, they don't get short with people, they're not tired From the customer perspective they're always friendly, they're always engaging. 

14:47

And if you think about it. In most police departments, the majority of the complaints that the organization has to deal with about their people are attitude complaints. Right, this person was short, this person had an attitude. They treated me like a jerk that kind of stuff. Machines don't do that, right? They never do that unless you program them to do that. They're always friendly, they never get mad. You can't punch their buttons and cause them to do this. 

15:08

So, and it will be both, I think, the development in the private sector around those kinds of tools and this ongoing recruiting and staffing crisis, and the cost of policing. Right In California, for instance, that has exceedingly high benefit costs. Especially the pay is relatively high because of the cost of living. But what is even more so is the benefit costs tied to retirement. Cities are not going to be able to afford to have the same number of cops or firefighters that they've had before. It's just. 

15:38

This is a simple math issue, because council people, the elected officials, don't get elected when a hundred percent of the money they're raising in the form of taxes go to police and fire. People expect the roads to be paved, the libraries to be open, the parks to be nice, the streets to be clean Suburban America. That's probably what they get elected on, more than public safety issues. That can change episodically, but I think my city is pretty much an example of that and it has never been public safety drove everything, even though that's important because of where we're located. The big issues are growth. 

Steve Morreale Host

16:09

Yeah, and I think police chiefs and police agencies are always struggling and fighting for that piece of the pie of which schools take a great deal. But all of the other things that are important, when you were talking about AI and the use and how it's going to begin to become more routine for policing, I always wonder. We learned some valuable lessons during COVID, and as much as police agencies will say that we resist change, we're pretty adaptable, but unfortunately I don't think that adaptability took shape the way I thought it would. In other words, we stopped going to houses for non-emergency, we asked them to stay out of it for a little while, stay out of the station. We slowed people down from car stops and let they where absolutely necessary, and we took a number of non-threatening complaints online or over the phone. 

16:59

But what strikes me is this Jim, we're old timers and we are not digital natives, right, but I think both of us in this case have adapted fairly well. I'm so curious. I'm always trying something new, but the young folks, the new breed, the new generation, my new students, have no adverse reaction to testing an app or accepting that it's not going to be a human being, that it's going to be an automated you know press one, press two, press three, so that that next generation is way more. I'm sure you and I have had this. I certainly have. Can I speak to someone in America or can I speak to a human being, right? 

Jim Bueermann Guest

17:40

right. Can I just talk to a human being? Yeah, can I just-. I've had these arguments with AI. 

Steve Morreale Host

17:44

Oh, my wife is glad that I have AI because I have something to argue with now. But I think that as we move along we're gonna drag the old timers into maybe not just AI, but into technology where the young folks they expect it. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

17:59

So I think we're already there and this is both a challenge and an opportunity. Right, the young people who are coming in to policing today have an expectation about technology that is very, very different than how, in most cases, I think, the leadership of the organizations view technology. One of my big concerns about AI that caused us as our very first project when we launched the very first meeting we had of all the fellows, was the creation of a model policy for the use of AI in policing, and we focused on large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini and things like that, and it's on our website for anybody to take off and use. I've done a couple of webinars where we've taken surveys of the participants that are all policing people and we did this even in your class. Consistently, we are seeing that police agencies do not have policies or training for their people to use that regulates or gives direction for their people about how to use AI products large language models like ChatGPT. A great part of where we are in the development of AI today is we've democratized the access to these very sophisticated models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, et cetera. 

19:05

The bad thing is we've democratized the use of these models all at the same time, because when you use ChatGPT, let's say, in your personal life, to help you research something or do whatever, the consequences of that model, fabricating things, embellishing, hallucinating is the term that's used are minimal, because it just is impacting what kind of truck you? You don't catch it as a street cop. That document could end up in court where you are then required to swear the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, under penalty of perjury that what's contained in that report is true and accurate. And if you miss that and you are facing a astute defense attorney who gets you to say that's my report and I swear everything in there is okay when they prove that that is an inaccurate report, even though you didn't intend it to be, you could easily find yourself on the receiving end of a Brady designation. And, depending on where you are, brady being designated, a Brady officer, is terminal, it's a kiss of death, right, right, and some agencies. 

20:13

But that doesn't mean we should be afraid of it. It just means we should have some basic training and some basic policy that now it can produce things that it would take you weeks to do and it'll do it in like 10 seconds. Yeah, I know the benefits are undeniable, but you just have to think of these things as tools. Right, every tool is beneficial. I'm not the greatest home repair guy and I've hurt myself a lot doing home repairs because this is just not. 

20:55

Apparently, it's outside your scope yep yeah I've smashed my finger, cut myself with saws all kinds of crap. A saw is really useful until you nick yourself right and then it becomes not so much fun. And this is the same thing great tools, you just have to understand what's going on. And so there is a tremendous void in policing training around the use of AI and policy around it, because there is a fundamental lack of knowledge in policing today about what AI is, where it is today, where it's going, how do we use it. So, as a result of that, in fact, we've created what's probably the first center on policing and artificial intelligence as part of the Institute, and that's where this policy resides. The mission of that particular piece is the safe and responsible use of AI by the police, and that is, I think, fundamental to the idea of police legitimacy and trust and confidence. 

Steve Morreale Host

21:45

Well, and I wrote a couple of things down. We're talking to Jim Bierman. He is the president of the Future Policing Institute and I would suggest, if you have an interest, to reach out to that website because there is some very interesting information. But my wife will say why are you using AI? And AI has helped my productivity a thousandfold and in some cases I will give you an example. But I want to say this it's the difference between information and intelligence. 

22:09

As you well know, intelligence cannot be done or it can be structured using AI, but it needs human intervention. And I think part of what you're saying is and even when I use it, I need to remove the flowery words I need to look to see what the sources are. I need to kind of argue sometimes with AI to say what is this? And I will see something that's out of sorts and I'll say that seems to be a hallucination. Would you go back and check the resources? 

22:36

Now, if I don't do that, I just cut and paste. This is what students do. I cut and paste it and there it is. That's my report. It is when you challenge it a little bit that you get better and better and better. But you have to have a general knowledge. I'm afraid of the dumbing down of America and maybe the world with this, but if there's a mistake, what you're saying, it undermines the credibility not only of that officer but of that organization and therefore of policing overall. So using it is good, but you have to use it appropriately you have to use it judiciously. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

23:07

AI is not replacing our brains. 

Steve Morreale

23:09

No, that's exactly it. That's that human intervention piece right. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

23:12

Right, I mean, I don't think at this point, in a way, you can take the humans out of the loop. We still have to spend time consciously using our critical thinking skills about whatever issues that's presented to us there are, and this is where I think training around basic AI concepts would help policing, because you can tell the models do not fabricate, don't make anything up. Give me your resources, don't BS me on all of this stuff and you, but you have to be articulate about it. You can even train them with your own writing style. You can feed it your own written documents and it'll write that way. 

23:47

You know, I'm struck by your wife's comments, cause my wife said the same thing to me one day and I said well, let me just ask you a question Do you ever Google anything? She said, yeah, I do it all the time. I said well then, you're using AI. Right now, we are already using AI in our day-to-day lives. If you have a smartphone, if you use a computer, if you're on the internet, if you Google anything, you are using AI. If you use Word, you're using a form of AI. If you add a few shekels to your office subscription, you can get Copilot built in, and so you'll have AI built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and it has tremendous advantages to what you're doing. Think about this. You're right, it's happening every day. 

Steve Morreale Host

24:23

Yeah, and you're absolutely right. You just caught my attention with your comment to your wife. And it's right. We are all writing emails and it'll say it'll highlight something that may be misspelled and it's catching out. That's AI. Do you want to say this a little bit different? That's AI. So we're already using those kinds of things in a very, very simplistic way. How is AI, ai being a technology? How is AI going to work with technology? You know now that we have a series of organizations that have said I want to use drones as first responders and I want to do it through my CAD and I want it to be sent to a particular location where this call came from, so I can beat the officer there and look over to see what the scene looks like. Ai is doing that. What other technologies? So let's talk about that drones as first responders for a minute. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

25:10

So I'm a big fan of drones. I love them, I love anything that flies, so that's just my own kind of quirkiness. But I think we should think of drones a little bit differently. Drones now are robots that happen to fly, and robots are driven by AI. There is a integration in any leading substantive drone manufacturer today of AI, it doesn't matter where you are. 

25:29

So look at a company like Axon. I have great admiration for Axon in a variety of ways, but they are early in my life. We had Taser and made by this company called Taser, which is now Axon. But Axon is really just like Apple is as much a software company as it is a hardware company. Axon is as much an AI company, in my view, as it is a hardware company. One of their product lines is our drones and this idea of drones as a first responder when you have fewer cops. You can kind of distill this down to the issue of situational awareness Get a hot call, the drone responds. Things that fly, are not encumbered by roads and motorists and all that stuff, so they get there faster. You now have a set of eyes in the form of cameras and whatever, on a scene that is rapidly evolving, long before the cops get there. That's feeding them situational awareness, which could save their lives, could save somebody else's life, could enhance the apprehension of the bad guys, which is part of what we're supposed to be doing, right. So I think they're a great thing. 

26:26

The challenge in dealing with that, depending on what city you're in, is how the community absorbs those things. Right that there is a community component all technology. There isn't any aspect of technology that I can think of that will not or is already touched by AI. It is that pervasive. There's nothing that I can think of that isn't going to be driven by AI on some level. Certainly the things we interact with all the time. Our computers and our phones already have AI built into them. The computer manufacturers are already hard coding AI into the operating systems for PCs and Macs, so you're not getting away with that, not using it. The same thing with your phones. All of the phones that are coming out now have a component of AI built into them. So, for instance, city policies that say you can't use AI and there are many cities that have taken that risk-averse posture that we're just not going to let you use it are failing to understand. If you're using a grammar checker, spell checker it's a form of AI. If you're using phones and computers, if you're buying new computers, ai is built into the operating system. So that's where we're going. 

27:21

Look at the trade show floor of IACP. Look at that or go. I used to send a couple of my people every year to Las Vegas for a conference called CES, which is the Consumer Electronics Show. It's the largest consumer trade show in the world. Probably every booth has an AI component in it. Now, that's just a reflection of how pervasive this is. 

27:40

So, when we think about human adaptation to whether it's extreme weather or social changes or technology, this is exactly where we are. We are adapting to this, and the sooner we adapt to it and understand it, the better, because very, very soon, sooner than we can probably comprehend, we will begin to witness these AI companies produce products that are, or very near, artificial, general intelligence, AGI or super intelligence. And when we hit that point in many writings, this is the notion of singularity, where the machines become smarter than the people, and you cannot tell the difference between a machine, the software, and a human being if you're not looking at them. It's incredible, and this is happening with robots, and there's a reason that these robotic companies are building robots that look like humans? Because everything in our world has been designed around hands and feet in the human appendages. So that's why the machines look that way, because they're going to replace human beings in many of those jobs. No reason human being, for instance, to go up to a bomb and disassemble it sometime in the future. 

Steve Morreale Host

28:37

I was just going to say that when you see the flexibility of these robot dogs that can go and open a door and go in and get shot at it and not necessarily be hurt because it's armored and feed back some video, it's just absolutely amazing. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

28:51

So if you look at the military as a glimpse of the future in terms of hardware and stuff and you look outside our country to militaries that are not restricted by our sense of sensibilities or concern for human rights and all of that, you look at some of the advances that China is making, for instance in robotics and arming robotics arming these dogs and other robots as a form of warfare, at some point these things are going to end up in the United States. You can buy outside the United States robotic dogs for about 3,500 bucks that somebody's going to smuggle in. If we can smuggle in untold amounts of dope, right of fentanyl and cocaine and heroin and people, these guys are certainly going to be able to smuggle in these robotic dogs. So imagine terrorists smuggling in some robotic dogs that has an assault rifle built on it and they just decide to remotely unleash that into a large crowd of people. Or when the cops show up, they are now not engaging a human with a gun, they're engaging a robot that might be tactically smarter than they are at that moment. 

29:50

I mean, this is the stuff of science fiction. But the value of reading some forms of science fiction is that those writers are really futurist. Look at the old versions of Star Trek, where they had communicators and translators. Axon's cameras this year will be doing real-time translation between people that don't speak English and the officer who does, and whatever that language is. Apple's working on AirPods that probably be out this year that have real-time language translation in them. So that is the stuff your phone can do it. Now I've used it? 

Steve Morreale Host

30:20

Yeah, I've used it when. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

30:21

Steve Morreale Host

I just came back from France and Italy and used it. Yeah, yeah. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

30:24

So we're already there in many ways. The challenge, I think, for police leaders these days is to find enough time to really focus on these things, because I wrote an article for Police One and the title is something like Are? I wrote an article for Police One and the title is something like are you a firefighter or a police chief? Right, because police leaders get caught up very quickly. This was my case, and I don't think I was unique at all In political, financial and personnel spot fire that consume your day. 

30:48

You show up on Monday intending to spend some time thinking about the strategy of your department, where you're going. Before you know it, you spend the whole day putting on these spot fires. So you're going to do it tomorrow. Well then, pretty soon your whole week gets consumed by this and that week turns into a month, turns into a year and if you're not careful, your career as the, for instance, a police chief, can be spent mostly putting out spot fires. You never get to really spend the time engaging in strategic foresight or trying to determine the direction of the agency. If you're not careful, it is a beast. Your calendar is a beast that you have to tame. This is where AI can be helpful because it may free up some time. 

Steve Morreale Host

31:21

I want to tell you. There were a few things that you talked about and it's just so fascinating to me and I'm not sure if it's fascinating to everybody else, but it is fascinating to me because as soon as you left the other day, you started talking about strategic thinking. We'll start on, but using AI. And so I said to them what have you done? What's going on? Okay, who needs to write a new policy? All right, let's talk about that and let's pull it up. 

31:40

I pulled up Claude and tell me what it is and I'm able to dictate now, so I don't even have to type. I dictate what I want and, Claude, it takes my words and it puts it. Oh, it seems like this is what you want. So here you go. You have to give it the most prompts, give it context. We're a police department, we're trying to do it. Don't put the name in but where are they doing wellness policies? And give me some examples. It started spitting it out in 10 to 12 seconds. So you know that because you've done it yourself. And the response in that room and I said to them look, if you're not using AI, you'd better, because everybody around you is your young people are going to do it. 

32:17

Street cops are definitely doing it, exactly that are doing it, and so that strikes me in a lot of ways as important. And give it a try. And when it started saying, oh, the Spokane Police Department is doing that and it gives you the link, it cuts down the time on research, and what I'll say to them is look, if you're not going to look in the future. And your discussion on strategic thinking opened up an entire new conversation at the command college, I must say, because we were talking about strategic planning and I've been talking about strategic thinking for years, but it went off my page because so many other things come up. But the idea of strategic thinking is really important with AI. But I want to give you a chance to talk about the Institute and help people understand how it could be of benefit, how it has grown, what your vision is and the vision of you and your fellows and the leaders there. Bill Tafoya. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

33:04

And my boss, who had been through the academy a couple of years before I did, said you got to take this class. So I signed up for it and discovered it was the only class at the NA that you actually had to apply for. You couldn't just sign up for it, you had to apply to get in this thing. So I got in and it was a very small class of about 10 people and it was a perspective-changing experience for me. I've had several of those right when I think when you become a cop, your perspective on the world changes. When you get married, when you have kids, there are these things that are fundamental in how you alter things, and I've had a couple of those professionally, and this was one of them. So I've always been interested in thinking about the future and where we're heading. 

33:48

I didn't really have opportunity to make something of this. I tried to do this when I was at the National Police Foundation, but when you're running an organization like that that is, national Policing Institute, as it's known now, is the country's oldest police research organization non-membership police research organization the spot fires I was putting out there had to do with I was just going to say the same thing happens. Right, yeah, research. And it was frustrating because I knew it was happening, the difference between being a police chief and not knowing it was happening until my buddy, chuck Wexler, pointed it out to me. Thank you, chuck. And this experience was I knew it was happening but I really struggled hard to control it because we were engaged in all kinds of interactions with the White House and on the Hill and these other groups and research, and then trying to raise money. 

Steve Morreale Host

34:31

I was just saying you're chasing funds and you're looking at the, you know the color of the day and doing that, and so yeah so it was tough. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

34:39

So when I retired from there I did some few years of consulting but I finally had to say I'm going to do this. So I did it and I just kind of started it Right. So we're very much a startup. We've been actively working on things for about a year. We have almost a hundred fellows. They're all over the United States from all kinds of aspects of policing. Most fellows they're all over the United States from all kinds of aspects of policing. Most of them have a direct connection to policing, but some of them don't. 

Steve Morreale Host

35:03

Some are journalists, some are therapists, some are researchers. Wait a minute, Jim. Is that your way of getting a free therapy session? All right, go on, go on, Although that's a heck of an idea. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

35:12

But the reason we did that is because we wanted a diversity of opinion, right? If you think of policing as, let's say, a can of Coke sitting in front of us and the label is facing you, Steve, and the ingredients label is facing me and I describe that and you describe it without turning that, it's going to look very different. There's this old parable about a bunch of vision-impaired people who were grabbing different ends of an elephant and trying to describe an elephant. And one says it has a long tube-like thing at the front and the other one says no, it isn't. It's got this little ratty little thing. It feels like a brush, which is the tail right. 

35:44

So if you allow yourself, as a police leader, to see policing only through a particular lens, then you're going to have problems. And so for us, if we're talking about the future and the purpose of this institute is to help practitioners, cops at every level, policymakers, interested community leaders have a better understanding of issues facing policing today, more importantly, what the impact is of those issues in the near future. Our time horizon's out to 2030. Right now, we don't go too far out and then try to produce content or connections to resources that are plain language right, that are not deep academic things, they're quick, bottom line kind of stuff. And this is how we use AI a lot. I use AI a lot. You were talking about using ChatGPT or Claude to do some policy. You can use tools like Google's Notebook LM to grab 10, let's say, policies on use of force. I'll just say that, put them in there and then tell the machine or the software give me a summary of all of these. What are the high points? 

Steve Morreale Host

36:38

What are the elements? What are the similar elements? 

Jim Bueermann Guest

36:42

And it's not going out to the internet, right, it's just staying inside there to do that. Well, we've started a series of webinars on how to teach people how to do that, and we're just focused on policing application. But this has application regardless of the context, quite frankly. But I said this earlier talking about, I think, the best use of AI for most people is assembling a toolbox, just like you might have a little toolkit at home that has a hammer, a screwdriver and a wrench. You don't just use one. You've got a tool that's really good at image generation, one that's really good at deep research, so you might use the deep research component of, let's say, perplexity, or now all of them have this. That is a different kind of an internet search than just asking it a simple question. It takes longer, but you'll end up with 30 or 70 citations and resources that you would never be able to easily do as a researcher. It might take you 40 hours. 

Steve Morreale Host

37:27

As a scholar. It has cut down on me. When I wrote the book, I used it as an editor, even though I had a human editor. Find the redundancies is the flow. It can be very valuable and in fact too, Jim, the reality is I didn't use a lot of the questions, but I simply said hey, I'm going to be talking to Jim Bierman on the podcast. He is this, this and this Give me a biography. It found the biography on you from other sources and it gave me some questions, none of which I've used, but it helped help me frame my mind. So it's tremendously valuable if you use it. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

37:56

So this is probably, I think, one of the most important aspects of it. Ai is very large. Language models are very good at helping you generate ideas. Right the creativity side for everything as simple as here's my article. What's a really compelling title for that article to? I want to write an article for Police Chief Magazine on, you know, the use of AI. What are the most important points I should probably address? I think writers can get themselves in trouble when they rely too much on AI, right? No question, if you read and if you use AI enough, it becomes immediately apparent when somebody has used AI to write the whole thing. Right, because if you don't train the models with your own writing style or give it very clear direction. You talked about prompt. This idea of what's called prompt engineering is probably the most fundamental and important skill set you should understand and learn when you're using these large language models, because the quality of what you get out of them directly related to the quality of the prompt you put in. 

Steve Morreale Host

38:50

Listen to a former police chief talking about AI prompts. Holy shit. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

38:56

And the weirder thing you have become. You can. Well, I have to say I never. When I was a baby street cop, chasing taillights and stuff, I never thought that I would be doing this. 

39:05

I know, me too, me too, but you can use these tools to write the prompts yourself, right? So I do a lot of image generation. I'm a visual person and I just like looking at the stuff. So sometimes I just will say something like give me an image of a futuristic police car because I want to see what it decides. I have to tell you there are some weird tendencies that AI has. It is infatuated with winged beings and drones and some other things that if you just let it run, it always does this. Or I've also said to ChatGPT I want to create an image, so write me a really good prompt that shows the following things an image. So write me a really good prompt that shows the following things. And then it goes in and gives me a whole page prompt language that I can use and stick that into ChatGPT's image generating pieces called Dali. And you can do that or stick it in Gemini, which gives you very photorealistic stuff, and it's some crazy stuff. I learn something new every single day. 

Steve Morreale Host

39:51

Where do you see? Where do you see? 

Jim Bueermann Guest

39:52

What I think the foundations, I mean the institutes. 

Steve Morreale Host

39:54

Yeah, and that's what I was going to say. Where do you see this going? What kind of traction are you getting, what kind of interest are you generating on the future policing institute? 

Jim Bueermann Guest

40:04

We're experimenting. I mentioned earlier, I have a very high tolerance for risk, so we try a lot of things. So we've got a pod. We're in the process of developing a series of four podcasts. The first one is out. It's called Policing in a Minute. Get it wherever you get your podcast, and it's very much an experiment. 

40:21

It is a very short podcast about a topic and we give you three of the most important things about a topic, let's say, hotspot policing in about a minute. So the whole thing with the intro and the outro and that stuff could be 90 seconds to two minutes, but the core piece is about a minute. And where we come up with, let's say, those three points is we go out and we look at all the literature we can find on hotspots policing. We take those reports, the research that nobody really wants to read unless you're into research, and we distill that down to these things. So the three points are the distillation of decades of rigorous evaluation about hotspots policing. Right, but we'll get it down to these three points so that if you don't have a whole lot of time, you'll hear that. So we've done one on your own SWAT team. 

How many cops do you need? Complacency, the series. We're experimenting with something right now. Two of the four episodes around officer fatigue are out now. The rest will probably come out this week, but those are 90 to two minute, 90 second to two minute episodes on an overview of fatigue on cops, the implications for performance and safety on cops, what cops can do about this themselves and what the agency can do. Those points are the result of us distilling down the research around opposite fatigue with the goal of giving practitioners and policymakers mostly knowledge, because this is a knowledge transfer initiative, I guess is one way to think about it. Right, we're capturing what we know about the future and trying to share it with people. But this is how we go out and do the heavy lifting with the research and give you something in a minute. 

41:52

The other podcast one will be focused on. It's called Future Policing, which is very similar to what you're doing now. In fact, I will probably ask you to be a guest of this. Okay, we'll do another one that is more specifically about AI and then we'll probably do another one where we which is more like an oral history project, where we're trying to capture the wisdom of the elders of the tribe right, the policing tribe. I love it. Before they pass on, or they just don't care anymore or they don't remember. Yeah, and that came about as a result of it's kind of morbid, but I sat a while back and started thinking about all of the coworkers that I've had over the years that are no longer with us, and these are people that I worked intimately with. 

42:30

A lot of institutional knowledge lost right and when I got to 30, I said, okay, I'm going to stop doing this because this is like wigging me out a little bit. But each of those people knew a lot about policing, but we never captured them, we never asked them. What did you learn along the way? We have a tendency in policing, and I think it's not great, but it's just the culture that we may value, you up to the point that you retire, and once you retire, you leave the collective memory of the institution pretty quickly. Sometimes it's because that's what you want, you don't? You really don't want anything more to do with policing. 

Steve Morreale Host

43:01

But I also think we should honor those contributions, especially with smaller agencies that have the ability to sit with people and grab that information, because that's knowledge management, which we don't do a good job of. But I also think and I one of my one of my favorite questions that works out quite well. I just did a training for a sheriff's department and one of the questions I asked them during it was lieutenants and captains thinking about leadership and the future of the organization was if you were king or queen the day, what one thing would you make a change to improve the organization? Or my other favorite is what do you know now that you wish you knew that? You know, if I came back to you and say, when you were chief for 10 years, what do you wish you knew in year one? That would have made life a little bit easier. And so those are questions that we let pass. George Kelling's gone and we never sat down and talked with him too much about those kinds of things. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

43:45

He's one of the people that I think about Because he had a connection to the Police Foundation. 

Steve Morreale Host

43:48

He did Even Daryl Stevens. I talk to him all the time he's down here in Bluffton, next town. I mean, this is just a giant that still has some value in what do you think? As you're watching? Right, and that's why I called you. You've got some history. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

44:00

Well, I guess this is a function of getting old, right? You just, you know, gain some stuff, but this is true at every level within the organization, right? And I really think we should be doing the same thing with people who have been dispatchers for 20 or 30 years. What did you learn? And the questions you just posed do differently, and you know there's a couple of country songs that I like that are kind of about that, right, if you could write yourself at 16, a letter, what would you write in there? About things like don't sweat the small stuff and, you know, pay attention to this or that. And if you could go back and do the same thing with our policing careers or whatever, but being able to capture this? You used a term that is not used often in policing, which is knowledge management. That is a big deal in the private sector. All Fortune 500 companies have a knowledge management function or capacity, because it's about making more money. 

Steve Morreale Host

44:50

You know, I want to interrupt you for a minute because when you're talking about that, maybe the Institute could do that. It is not about the future, it's about the past, but it's the past looking to the future. In other words, let's streamline what new investigators. This is really important, Jim, because a new investigator or an investigator leaves and you know the way policing is okay. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

Well, sorry, we had a rotational plan. 

Steve Morreale Host

45:10

Well, exactly, but sergeant is gone and he's moved on to the next job, so he's not going to help you with the old job. Well, wait a minute. Why didn't we sit down and say what do you know now? What did you do differently in year five? To collect information on a case, to get it ready for what do I do next? Who do I interview? What evidence do I need? Those kinds of things would be extremely valuable if we documented it and used it, and AI could help us do that. Here are some of the shortcuts. Here are some of the things that people learned over time. We're missing all of that. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

45:39

We are totally. Years ago I did some work with a researcher by the name of Michael Pendleton, who's a great guy, and he did the majority of the work, but we co-authored an article for the cop's office about knowledge management and policing. I've read it and I love it. That's where I was trying to push it, yeah, and so he introduced to me a model that I think still has applicability today that has four components to it around managing our knowledge and then just simply the four areas are and ask the questions how do we capture what we know about crime and disorder or homicide investigation or traffic accident investigation, whatever it is right? But how do we capture, use share and increase what we know about? Fill in the blank right Capture, use share increase. 

46:17

If we can overlay that on our department, you can mitigate the downside to rotational programs, to rotational program. So in my agency we thought once you got promoted we had an obligation to the people who work for you to make sure you were the best well-rounded boss they could have because you serve them. And part of it came from my own experience of having bosses who knew nothing about, let's say, traffic investigation or homicide investigation and when I had a question as a baby cop about how to do this. They couldn't answer and I thought that didn't make any sense. Right, your sergeant is supposed to be the God of all knowledge. Right, they're supposed to know everything. But we had a structural problem where, when we didn't rotate people, we had people with deep expertise in a particular area, but they didn't know anything else about other stuff. 

46:59

Right, it's almost like medicine, where we have neurosurgeons over here and thoracic surgeons here and pediatricians over here and family physicians over here, very narrow areas of knowledge and when you have a bunch of them, maybe that's not so bad, but in policing that's not generally how we operate and aside from that there is such a profound turnover, especially at the leadership. We're very much like the military in that we have a very limited shelf life and then we're out and it's like 20 and out. In California you max in the retirement system at 30 years generally, and so that's the number that everybody gets to, and usually most of them don't even get to 30, about 27 years and you're gone. Okay, you learned something in those 27 years, whether you were a street cop, a detective, a sergeant, a chief, whatever it doesn't. How do we capture that so that the people following on and you know this is on when the people who have succeeded you keep calling you when you are a retiree and saying, hey, how did we do this? 

Steve Morreale Host

47:51

What's the backstory on this? I know? 

Jim Bueermann Guest

47:53

And you realize we did not do a good job of this historical collection of stuff, because when you think about the future, for instance, time exists on a continuum Past. Present and future are all connected. 

Steve Morreale Host

48:03

Yes, and you have to think about that stuff. And if we don't remember the history, then it repeats itself because, well, how did that happen? Well, we didn't know it happened. And it happened again because we didn't pass it on. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

48:20

We're the kings of repeating history in policing. We do it all the time. If you've been in it long enough, you see these things reoccur over and over. Like 10 years ago we were actually doing that right and now we're doing it again. And why? It's because we've lost the institutional knowledge, yeah, that's a big deal. But today I think you make a really valid point here, Steve, that AI. We just have to figure out how to connect the little pieces, but AI would be a huge boon to that. 

Steve Morreale Host

48:38

Well, I agree we're going to wind down because I'm running way over time, but it's been a fascinating conversation. That may not be the last one Talking to Jim Bierman, who runs the Future Policing Institute. What I think is important is that we're constantly pushing the envelope, which we're constantly trying to be professional. We're using some business tactics in policing and you're not going to get there if you just do the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results. So in some cases, the new police chiefs have to be looking forward. I think it has to be part of their repertoire what are you doing today? What are you doing tomorrow? Where are we at in the future? And it seems to me that that's the mindset that we have to create, and I tried very hard. Go ahead, sir. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

49:17

So, if I can just leave you with this one thought based on what you just said, I believe that the singular responsibility of police leaders today in this country is to prepare their organizations for an increasingly uncertain future, long after they have left the agency. 

Steve Morreale Host

49:34

I think that's really important. So thank you so much for your time and for your energy and for what you are doing. I think it's great. How do people get to the Future Policing Institute or reach out to you? 

Jim Bueermann Guest

49:43

So the URL for the institute is very simple. It's futurepolicing.org and you can sign up for our newsletters and our announcements. The podcasts right there on the website and within the website is the Center on Policing and Artificial Intelligence. You can also get to that directly through the acronym cop-ai.org. Futurepolicing.org gets you to the whole kit and caboodle. 

Steve Morreale Host

50:05

I wish you the best of luck with what you're trying to do. It's extremely important work. It's innovation encapsulated in the future, which I think is so important. So this is Jim Bierman. Thanks for being here, Jim. 

Jim Bueermann Guest

Thank you, Steve, my pleasure. 

Steve Morreale Host

That's another podcast on the CopDoc podcast in the can. Stay tuned for future episodes. Want to thank you for being here. Stay safe and keep thinking about the future. All the best. 

Intro Outro Announcement

50:28

Thanks for listening to The CopDoc Podcast with Dr Steve Morreale. Steve is a retired law enforcement practitioner and manager, turned academic and scholar from Worcester State University. Please tune into The CopDoc Podcast for regular episodes of interviews with thought leaders in policing.