Evidence cloud

On July 10, 2025 the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an investigation concluding that Axon’s Draft One, which drafts police reports from body-camera audio, is designed in a way that frustrates audits. Reviewing police reports, emails, procurement documents, department policies, software settings and Axon’s own manuals and marketing, EFF found it is often impossible to tell which parts of a report were generated by AI and which were written by an officer, because Draft One does not retain the initial AI-generated draft. Administrators cannot produce a list of all Draft One activity across a department; they can only inspect an individual officer’s audit log or a single evidence item. An Axon representative told one agency there is no filter for Draft One reports. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, which requires a disclosure on each report, isolated more than 3,000 Draft One reports generated between December 2024 and March 2025.

The City of New Orleans canceled a $6 million contract with Swedish firm Hexagon for a cloud-based 911 records system. Signed in early 2021 for OnCall Records, the project aimed to combine 20 police records systems. The city cited technical delays, no workable data access plan, and inability to generate compliant reports. The system might have increased time to write police reports. The city is evaluating alternative systems.

On April 14, 2023 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Axon could bring its constitutional challenge to the Federal Trade Commission’s structure in federal district court rather than first going through the FTC’s own administrative process. The dispute began after Axon acquired rival body-camera maker Vievu in 2018. The FTC began an antitrust investigation into the acquisition. Axon sued, arguing the proceeding violated its due-process rights and that the FTC’s structure improperly insulated it from the president. A district court had dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds. On October 9, 2023 the FTC dismissed its antitrust complaint against Axon.

In late 2022, Chesterfield County’s automated record deletion system purged police radio recordings related to Charlotte Carter’s arrests, including communications one hour before and after each arrest. Carter had filed a FOIA request in November 2022 seeking those records, along with a lawsuit challenging a $24,000 cost estimate. The deletions occurred after the FOIA petition was filed but before the county disclosed the records no longer existed. In March 2026, Carter’s attorney moved for sanctions against the county and county attorney Julie Seyfarth. Trial arguments are scheduled for June 2026.

An independent investigation by Kirkland & Ellis LLP found that a backup technician’s errors during a server migration caused the permanent loss of approximately 20.68 terabytes of Dallas Police Department data. The data included family violence and FUSION records. Only 3.26 terabytes were recovered from other sources. The report states the data is unrecoverable in its original format. The technician deleted archived data from cloud storage after incorrectly copying placeholder files to on-premises servers.

On April 5, 2021, the city of Dallas learned that a police employee had accidentally deleted 22 terabytes of digital case files while migrating data from a cloud-based archive to an on-premise server. Police recovered 14 terabytes; the remaining 8 terabytes are believed permanently deleted. The files included audio recordings, case notes, images and videos. The deletion affected prosecution of cases with offense dates before July 28, 2020. At least one murder trial was delayed. The police department attributed the deletion to human error and announced new safeguards, including requiring two employees for file migrations and a 14-day recycle bin.