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Comment by lsy | Hacker News Reader

There is a valid point that in a society where police have broad immunity and little oversight, the requirement to do paperwork sometimes serves a purpose in introducing enough friction to moderate the capriciousness of initiating an interaction. If you have to do paperwork you are more likely to reserve paperwork-generating actions for situations that truly warrant it. Making that a push-button process means that the “fun part” of apprehending someone and exerting power over them has less downside and may happen even when it’s unnecessary.

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The flip side of that is, what the cop thinks warrants paperwork is different from what citizens think warrants paperwork.

Cops will often gaslight victims of crimes in an attempt to not have to do paperwork. I witnessed a man attempt to steal a car while the owner was unloading supplies into his store (a pizza place in NYC). He failed to steal it only because he couldn't get it into gear(a manual transmission), and probably damaged the clutch a bit.

when the cops showed up, it was clear the cops did not want to write it up, and went as far to accuse the owner of lying(and actual phrase said by the cops: "how do we know you didn't say he could sit in your car?", and threatening him with making a false report, or assaulting the thief by holding him until the cops showed up if he pushed it.

Of course, there could be other reasons for not doing it. Maybe they're under pressure from their commander to not take crime reports so the crime rate appears lower in the neighborhood than it actually is. But I assumed it was garden variety professional laziness.

I don't think an LLM will fix the problem of a police officer who only enforces the law at their leisure. For all we know, the thief was their nephew or an informant, and the officer was deliberately protecting them.

Sure, but it removes the "I don't want to do paperwork" as one of the reasons why a victim might be ignored by a cop. Assuming LLMs actually save cops time on paperwork

Let's not swallow a cat to chase a fly. I'm sure LLMs could help police by for instance, providing a semantic search capability in a document retrieval system. I could see that working a lot better than fuzzy search in some cases (instead of searching for "Robert," "Rob," "Bob," etc, maybe you could identify messages about Robert. With enough context, maybe you could even do this with a message where they weren't mentioned by name.).

But writing police reports is a nuts and bolts idea liable to introduce way worse problems than what it purports to solve.

Even if this did free up an officer's time, it's not guaranteed that would go to better policing. The department might see it as license to create heavier processes and more paperwork. These reporting requirements don't come out of nowhere, there are strong incentives to create visibility and accountability and they won't disappear if you make paperwork cheaper.

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