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The Arrest Report in Your DUI Case May Have Been Written by Software. California Now Makes Them Say So.

California's SB 524 took effect January 1, 2026, and it forces police reports to disclose when artificial intelligence drafted them, preserve the first AI draft, and log who ran the tool. In DUI cases, where the officer's narrative of odor, slurred speech, and field sobriety performance often is the case, that retained draft is new impeachment material. Utah requires disclosure and certification but no draft retention. Roughly 48 states require nothing at all.

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The Arrest Report in Your DUI Case May Have Been Written by Software. California Now Makes Them Say So.

In most DUI prosecutions, the evidence is a story. An odor of alcohol coming from the driver's side window. Slurred speech. Bloodshot, watery eyes. Swaying while standing. A "failed" walk-and-turn. Those observations live in one document: the arrest narrative written by the officer who made the stop. In a refusal case, or a case where the chemical test is marginal or contested, that narrative can carry the entire prosecution.

Since January 1, 2026, California law enforcement agencies have to tell you when a machine wrote the first version of it.

What California SB 524 Actually Requires

Senate Bill 524, authored by Senator Jesse Arreguín, was signed on October 10, 2025 and became operative January 1, 2026, adding Section 13663 to the California Penal Code. It does not ban artificial intelligence in report writing. It builds a paper trail around it.

The statute's disclosure language is not left to the agency to paraphrase. Any report created in whole or in part with AI must carry this sentence:

This report was written either fully or in part using artificial intelligence.

Four duties come with it:

  • Disclosure. The report must carry the verbatim statement above and identify the artificial intelligence program used.

  • First-draft retention. The agency must retain the first draft created by the AI "for as long as the official report is retained." That is an open-ended obligation tied to the life of the underlying case file, not a fixed record-retention term.

  • An audit record. The agency must keep records identifying the person who used AI to create the report and the video and audio footage that was used to create it.

  • Officer verification. The preparing officer must sign the report, physically or electronically, verifying that they reviewed it and that the facts stated in it are true and correct.

The law also restricts the vendor side. Companies that process agency data through their AI tools are barred from sharing, selling, or otherwise using that data, except for agency purposes or under court order. They may still access it to troubleshoot, mitigate bias, improve accuracy, or refine the system.

One definitional point matters for DUI practice. According to the Assembly Public Safety Committee analysis, the statute reaches two categories of tool: systems that draft a narrative from in-car or body-worn camera audio and video, and systems that take an officer's dictated report and generate a narrative enhanced by generative AI. Dictation-based products are covered. An agency cannot avoid the disclosure duty by pointing out that the officer spoke the facts first.

The Sleeper Provision

Buried in the statute is a sentence that changes what a defense request can ask for. SB 524 provides that "except for the official report, a draft of any report created with the use of artificial intelligence shall not constitute an officer's statement."

Read quickly, that sounds like it takes the draft off the table. It does the opposite. The draft is not the officer's adopted statement, so the officer cannot be cross-examined on it as a prior statement in the ordinary way. But it is a retained record that the agency is legally required to keep for the life of the report. It exists, it is in the agency's custody, and it is therefore something a court can be asked to order produced. The provision makes the draft non-adoptable, not non-existent.

The Rest of the Map, Stated Accurately

California is one of two states with a statute on this. It is by a wide margin the stronger one.

Utah. SB 180, effective May 7, 2025, was the first state law in the country on AI-drafted police reports. It requires an agency to adopt a written generative-AI policy, requires a disclaimer on any report created in whole or in part by generative AI, and requires the officer to certify that the report was checked for accuracy. It does not require the agency to retain the AI's first draft. If you have seen Utah and California described as imposing parallel duties, that is not accurate. The retention duty is the piece with teeth, and Utah does not have it.

Utah's bill was prompted in part by an incident in Heber City, in which drafting software working from body-camera audio pulled dialogue from the animated film The Princess and the Frog into an official narrative. That is worth sitting with in a DUI context, because roadside audio is exactly the environment where a radio, a passenger, a television inside an open doorway, or a bystander is competing with the driver for the microphone.

Connecticut. In April 2026, Chief State's Attorney Patrick Griffin imposed a statewide moratorium on using AI "to draft, author and/or narrate criminal reports," pending testing and rulemaking. The Connecticut Police Chiefs Association and State Police backed the pause. Fewer than five departments in the state had explored the tools, New Haven among them. Government Technology reported the same account independently.

King County, Washington. The earliest and bluntest position came from a prosecutor, not a legislature. In a September 2024 email to area police chiefs, Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Daniel J. Clark wrote that his office "will not accept any police report narratives that have been produced with the assistance of AI," and that all reports must be produced entirely by the officer. Clark was careful to say the office does not fear advances in technology but has legitimate concerns about some of the products currently on the market. He raised CJIS non-compliance for many of them, and he gave a specific example: an otherwise excellent report that referenced an officer who was not at the scene. As GeekWire noted, that is precisely the sort of error a reviewing officer skims past and a cross-examiner does not.

Bills that did not pass. New York's S10425, from Senator Kristen Gonzalez, with companion A9253-A, would have required a public AI inventory, in-report disclosure, retention of generative-AI first drafts, and certification, enforceable by the Attorney General and by private suit with fees. It sat in the Senate Codes Committee as of May 15, 2026 and did not pass the session. Minnesota's SF 4575, from Senator Maye Quade, with companion HF 4536, would have prohibited generative AI in official records including police reports. It was referred to Senate Judiciary and Public Safety on March 18, 2026 with no further action recorded.

That leaves roughly 48 states with no statutory disclosure duty at all. In those states, everything below has to be built out of ordinary criminal discovery, Brady and Giglio obligations, public-records requests, and the vendor's own settings and logs.

Why DUI Is the Sharp Edge of This

AI drafting touches every kind of report. It cuts deepest in DUI cases for a structural reason.

A burglary case has physical evidence. A fraud case has documents. A DUI case where the driver refused testing, or where the breath result is close to the limit and contested, frequently comes down to what the officer says they perceived in the eight minutes between the stop and the handcuffs. NHTSA's DWI Detection and Standardized Field Sobriety Test curriculum is explicit about this. It trains officers in note-taking, report writing, and courtroom testimony as connected skills, because the contemporaneous notes and the written narrative are what the officer will testify from months later, and they are what the prosecution's case is built on.

So the question of who actually composed the first draft of that narrative is not a technicality. If a system summarized body-camera audio into a paragraph about slurred speech and an unsteady gait, and the officer read it, agreed with it, and signed it, the officer's memory has been anchored to a machine's summary before the officer ever reconstructed the scene independently. Whether that produced an accurate report is a fair question. Whether the defense gets to ask it depends on whether any record survives.

What EFF Found Inside the Leading Product

On July 10, 2025, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an investigation by Beryl Lipton, Dave Maass, and Matthew Guariglia into Axon's Draft One, the product at the center of this debate. The findings are the reason the California retention duty matters.

  • The original draft is not saved. An Axon product manager told EFF: "we don't store the original draft and that's by design... the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches."

  • The audit log records three things. Requesting a generation, signing a Draft One liability disclosure, and changing Draft One settings. It does not record which text was AI-generated.

  • There is no version history. Officers copy the AI draft into the records management system, the draft window closes, and nothing survives that distinguishes AI-written sentences from officer-written ones.

  • The disclosure statement is a department-level toggle. Agencies that turn it on can keyword-search their RMS to find AI-assisted reports. EFF found that agencies that left it off had no way to generate a list of their own AI-assisted reports at all.

  • Crime categories are configurable. An agency can decide which offense types Draft One may be used for, which makes the setting itself relevant to whether a DUI narrative was even eligible for AI drafting.

EFF's summary of the investigation put it plainly: the product is designed in a way that hinders auditing. When California's law passed, EFF observed the direct consequence. Because Draft One does not retain drafts, California departments using it must either get the product changed or preserve drafts by some manual process. EFF's year-end review flagged the flip side of erased drafts as well: with no draft to compare against, an officer whose testimony is contradicted by the report can attribute the discrepancy to the AI.

Discovery Mechanics, Part One: California Cases

If the arrest was in California on or after January 1, 2026, and the report carries the disclosure line, four things now exist by statute and should be requested by name:

  • The retained first draft generated by the AI.

  • The name of the artificial intelligence program used.

  • The audit record identifying the person who ran the tool and the specific video and audio footage that fed it.

  • The signed verification by the preparing officer.

The duty runs to the agency and the officer, not to the vendor. If Axon or another company does not save drafts, that is the agency's compliance problem to solve, not a defense to production. Ask what the agency's preservation process is. If the answer is that there isn't one, that answer is itself worth having on the record early, in writing, before anyone has a reason to reconstruct it.

Discovery Mechanics, Part Two: The Other 48 States

Without a statute, the request has to be assembled from other materials. EFF's public-records guide to Draft One maps the categories that actually exist, and they convert cleanly into a defense checklist:

  • The agency's written AI policy, and any general order governing report drafting.

  • The agency's Draft One configuration: which crime categories are enabled, and whether the disclosure statement toggle is on or off. Screenshots of the settings page are a real, obtainable record.

  • Axon Evidence and Axon Records audit logs for the report, the officer, and the date.

  • The procurement contract, purchase order, and any memorandum of understanding with the vendor.

  • Vendor training materials and any instruction given to officers about reviewing output.

  • Pilot program evaluations and internal assessments.

  • Email between the agency and the vendor, which is where known error modes and complaints tend to surface.

The legal hook in a non-disclosure state is usually Brady and Giglio rather than a statute. If the tool has documented error modes, and if the agency knew about them, that bears on the reliability of the narrative the state intends to put in front of a jury. The NACDL has run practitioner training on scrutinizing and challenging AI-generated report evidence, including accuracy, bias, and Fourth Amendment implications, which is a useful signal that the defense bar is treating this as a live practice area rather than a curiosity.

The Cross-Examination

The examination writes itself once the records are in hand. The points to establish, in order:

  • The officer did not write the first draft of the narrative. A system did.

  • The officer cannot now identify which specific sentences they wrote and which the system produced.

  • In most states, the draft no longer exists to compare. In California, it does, and it can be placed alongside the final report line by line.

  • If the agency left the disclosure toggle off, the report gave no indication that AI touched it, and the agency cannot even produce a list of which of its reports were AI-assisted.

  • The observations the officer swore were true and correct were first assembled by software summarizing audio from a roadside stop.

Set that against the standard testimony that the report reflects the officer's independent recollection of the encounter. Those two things are in tension, and the jury is entitled to hear about the tension.

The Argument on the Other Side

It deserves a fair statement. Agencies and vendors argue that AI drafting returns a significant amount of officer time to patrol, and that the accountability mechanism is already built in: the officer reads the draft, corrects it, and signs it under penalty of the same consequences that attach to any false report. Law enforcement trade coverage of SB 524 treats the new disclosure and preservation obligations as a compliance burden layered on a tool that is otherwise doing useful work.

The response is not that officers are careless. It is that a review is only as good as the record behind it. Clark's King County example makes the point better than any argument: the report was otherwise excellent, and it still placed an officer at a scene he was not at. A reviewing officer under time pressure can miss that. The consequence lands later, when the officer swears to the report on the stand. As EFF framed the King County position, that is exposure for the officer as much as for the defendant. SB 524's answer is to force the audit trail into existence so that review can actually be checked. California public radio coverage reached the same conclusion about the practical gap between what the statute demands and what the leading product currently does.

What to Ask For, and When

If you are facing a DUI charge, three things are worth raising with your attorney in the first discovery round, not the third:

  • Ask whether the arrest report carries an AI disclosure. In California, it is required to and the language is fixed. Elsewhere, the absence of a disclosure does not mean AI was not used, because in most places nothing requires one.

  • Ask for a preservation letter to go out early. Where the tool does not save drafts by design, delay is not neutral. Anything not preserved on request may simply not exist by the time it is litigated.

  • Ask for the agency's AI policy and tool configuration, not just the report. Whether the disclosure toggle was on, and whether DUI was an enabled crime category, are facts about the agency that exist independently of your case file.

One honest caveat. As of August 2026, no published appellate decision squarely addressing discovery of an AI-generated police report draft has been located. The 2026 rulings that touch AI and discovery concern civil litigants and expert witnesses, not police narratives. This is an emerging area, not settled law. That cuts both ways: there is no controlling authority requiring production outside California's statute, and there is none foreclosing it either. What matters in that posture is making the request, making it specifically, and preserving the record when it is denied.

The underlying point is simple enough. For decades, the DUI arrest narrative has been treated as the officer's own account, written from the officer's own notes and memory. In a growing number of departments, that is no longer a safe assumption. California decided the report should say so. Most states have not decided anything yet.

Sources

Note: This article contains AI-assisted content and has been reviewed by our editorial team.

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Gavel Daily is an AI-operated publication. Articles may summarize statutes, court filings, or public reporting, but readers should verify time-sensitive legal details with primary sources or a licensed attorney.

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