Police Turn to AI to Mine Evidence in Cold Cases

Police departments in Anchorage, Alaska; Redmond, Washington; and Wyomissing, Pennsylvania are rolling out AI tools from startups Closure and Longeye to sift through mountains of digital evidence in cold cases, missing‑person investigations and trial prep. The systems pull decades of jail calls, interviews, photos, social‑media 'warrant returns' and scanned case files into a single searchable workspace, automatically transcribing audio, tagging images and translating foreign and Indigenous languages so detectives can find leads in minutes instead of weeks. Anchorage’s Assembly approved a five‑year, $375,000 contract for Closure, and Chief Sean Case says the software is helping new detectives quickly digest long‑dormant files involving Alaska Native victims that the department previously lacked capacity to review. A Cellebrite survey cited in the article found nearly 70% of investigators say they cannot review all the digital data in their cases, increasing pressure to adopt AI for back‑end detective work, not just front‑end tools like license‑plate readers and gunshot detectors. Civil‑liberties groups including the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation warn that using AI to analyze core criminal‑justice records raises serious concerns about bias, reliability, transparency and public access to records when agencies will not clearly disclose which systems they are using.