Rabbit Creek council asks Assembly to limit AI use of police plate-reader data

The Rabbit Creek Community Council voted 17-0 on Oct. 8 to ask the Anchorage Assembly to address how artificial intelligence processes police license plate data before it finishes the city's new surveillance rules.

The city's focus on limiting which staff can use the Axon system "sidesteps the concern that the data gathered will be automatically processed by an AI and 'predictive analytics' data model in a manner that is opaque to the public," the council wrote in its letter. It asked the city to say exactly which Axon AI tools the police department has licensed, enabled or plans to use.

The proposed ordinance already bars police from acting solely on predictive analytics. It also bars sharing surveillance data to help enforce another jurisdiction's law against conduct that's legal in Alaska, unless law, a judicial warrant or a court order requires it. The council wants those limits to cover not just the raw data but anything "generated, inferred, derived, classified" or otherwise produced from it. It said the Assembly hadn't addressed testimony that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has used similar data to find and deport people.

The council also wants quarterly bias testing of any AI tools police use. Among 17 questions it suggested putting to Axon is whether the company or its subcontractors may use Anchorage data to train their models. The ordinance's sponsors have also questioned the data terms in the city's Axon contract.

The Assembly amended the rules Oct. 20 but ran out of time before a final vote. It takes them up again Nov. 4.