This program confronts one of the most consequential—and least transparent—developments in modern criminal practice: the rise of predictive policing, mass surveillance, and AI-generated police reports in drug cases and everyday law enforcement. It explains how tools marketed as “data-driven” or “objective” policing are built on historical arrest data, biased inputs, and opaque algorithms that quietly shape stops, searches, charging decisions, and bail outcomes. By pulling these systems out of the shadows, the program reframes predictive policing and AI reporting not as neutral technology, but as prosecutorial evidence streams that must be challenged like any other source of suspicion or proof.

Criminal defense lawyers who watch this program will gain concrete strategies for identifying when predictive algorithms and AI tools are influencing their cases—even when police reports never say so explicitly. The program breaks down the different categories of predictive policing systems, including location-based heat maps, person-specific risk tools, social-network mapping, and automated surveillance technologies, and shows how each can infect reasonable suspicion, probable cause, and “high-crime area” determinations. Lawyers will learn how to demand discovery, litigate trade-secret claims, raise selective-enforcement and equal-protection challenges, and turn the government’s own data against it to expose racial bias, inaccuracy, and discriminatory effect.

The program also delivers urgently practical guidance on confronting AI-written police reports and automated risk assessments. Defense attorneys will learn how AI tools like Axon’s Draft One reshape narratives, insert facts officers never perceived, and sanitize constitutional deficiencies after the fact—all while departments quietly opt out of disclosure and ethical safeguards. By teaching lawyers how to challenge AI-generated narratives, demand drafts and metadata, attack reliability, and reassert Fourth and First Amendment protections, this program equips criminal defense attorneys to fight back against tech-washed policing. The payoff is real leverage: stronger suppression motions, discovery-driven dismissals, exposed credibility gaps, and a meaningful defense against a surveillance-based system that increasingly decides who gets stopped, charged, and jailed.

Note: This program appears in more than one collection on NACDL MyCLE On-Demand. Before purchasing, please ensure that you do not already have access to this program.