During Metro’s annual State of the Department address in February, Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill unveiled the department’s K.V.N. Project — short for Knowledge, Value and Network — an AI system he said was aimed at streamlining work and connecting separate work platforms used by staff.
“That AI brain’s going to interconnect our technology systems so that our information flows smoothly, securely and intelligently,” McMahill said. “This will be one of the most impactful technology projects we’ve ever embarked on.”
McMahill hasn’t said much else publicly about the project, but he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal earlier this month that Metro’s rollout of the K.V.N. Project is still in its early stages. The immediate goal is to utilize AI for administrative tasks such as assisting with fulfilling public records requests, McMahill said.
Eventually, Metro wants investigators to use AI on tasks like parsing through databases or constructing a timeline of events, which currently take humans hours to complete but could be done by a computer in minutes, McMahill said.
Regardless of Metro’s intent, the department’s deployment of AI raises questions about what data Metro is collecting from the general public and how it is being used, said Chris Peterson, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.
“To be frank, LVMPD should be concerned about the constitutionality of what they’re doing,” Peterson said in a phone interview Wednesday. “It’s an issue related to accountability.”
Petersen said while it’s easy to hold an individual police office accountable for their actions if they are accused, for example, of writing a report in a biased fashion, he questioned how police could be held responsible for arrests or stops that could one day be instigated by AI.
Beryl Lipton, a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group, added that most machine learning models reflect the bias of the content they learn from. This could also result in police AI potentially targeting certain groups of people inadvertently, Lipton said.
“Generally, when dealing with artificial intelligence and applying it to daily (police) operations, whether that’s sort of administratively or more in an investigatory role, I think something that people always have to be concerned about are misidentifications and hallucinations,” Lipton said. “Because that’s something that we know artificial intelligence does all the time.”
ACLU: ‘Not going to be limited to administrative processes’
Lipton authored a chapter about the rise of AI in policing in the American Bar Association’s 2024 State of Criminal Justice report. In that report, she wrote AI can enable police to facilitate “mass privacy invasion” and that the widespread use of AI could make inequalities and abuses in policing more routine.
That’s become even more true as departments like Metro have been able to successfully expand general surveillance through initiatives like drone programs and real-time crime centers, Lipton said. Many of these technologies also require infrastructure, such as an array of video cameras, that could infringe on the privacy of innocent bystanders.
Lipton further noted that AI tools aren’t perfect, and that certain use cases, like using facial recognition programs or license plate scanners, can misidentify innocent people as potential suspects. It could also be problematic if Metro decided to utilize AI tools for so-called predictive policing, which relies on crime trends to deploy law enforcement resources strategically to prevent crimes from happening.
That, Lipton said, could lead to profiling, particularly among disadvantaged communities.
“When you feed that into a machine and ask the machine where the crimes are going to occur, it’s just going to spit out the places that you have previously identified crimes,” Lipton said. “That’s not really a great way to police if you want to police fairly, and I think we’ve seen in a lot of contexts that can play out really poorly for particular communities.”
Peterson said while AI could also be used to hold officers who are accused of wrongdoing accountable, it could also be used to justify mass surveillance for the sake of fighting crime.
“It’s not going to be limited to administrative processes,” Peterson said. “If you’re looking for maximum safety and disregarding things like privacy and civil liberties, you want that AI tied into as much of your data as possible.”
‘I want to be transparent about what it is we’re doing’
During a sit-down interview with the Review-Journal on March 5, McMahill acknowledged potential privacy concerns. To alleviate those concerns, McMahill said the department needs to be transparent about its goals for using AI.
“AI has a self-learning capability, and so it’ll continue to teach how to reduce administrative time for us to handle those types of requests,” McMahill said of the K.V.N. Project’s initial rollout. “I want to be transparent about what it is that we’re doing and I want the community to understand what we’re doing.”
In lieu of legislation or regulations governing how Nevada police departments can use AI, Lipton and Peterson said one thing Metro could do to quell concerns about the K.V.N. Project would be to publish and make publicly available the department’s AI policies and procedures.
McMahill did not state whether Metro had established AI guidelines and a public information officer was not immediately available to answer follow-up questions about Metro’s AI policies.
That would at least ensure the public would have some idea about the data being collected about them while in public, Lipton said. Departments like Metro should also make sure there are measures to hold those overseeing the AI systems accountable, she said.
“Part of what has to happen is that law enforcement officers need to have a policy and understanding internally that there has to be a human being who is being held accountable for these decisions,” Lipton said. “There are common-sense steps that law enforcement can take.”
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