From Elon Musk to cop car chases, how a software engineer launched a police AI startup
Reading Time: 3 minutesEarlier this year, Abel founder Daniel Francis was in a car going 135 miles per hour down a highway in Oakland, California. The driver, a police officer, had a gun in his lap.
Francis has made a habit of riding shotgun with policemen in the name of research for his company, which creates AI to fill out police reports. Usually, the rides are fairly uneventful. But that day, the officer had pulled over a man to search his car. The man freaked out and pressed the gas pedal, almost hitting someone. Francis and the officer took off chasing him. ‘I was so excited,’ Francis recalled. ‘I was like, finally, it’s happening! Finally, not just a stolen car call where we go and fill out a report.’
After 40 minutes — and a dicey last act through the narrow Oakland Hills streets — the man’s car sputtered to a stop, out of gas. The officer was visibly sweating; Francis’s heart was pounding. But between near-missing parked cars and swerving down the highway, Francis had time to think about AI. Specifically, how would AI write up a police report for a car chase? ‘That’s one of the hardest reports to write,’ he said. ‘When you write a pursuit report, you have to list out every side street that you went by and every turn you took. Those reports are massive.’
In his 20 police ride-alongs, Francis has spent a lot of time thinking about how AI can help cut down on police paperwork. His company, Abel, creates AI that uses body cam footage and dispatch call data to fill out normally time-consuming police reports. On Thursday, he announced that Abel has raised a $5 million seed round led by Day One Ventures with participation from Long Journey Ventures and backing from Y Combinator as part of the summer 2024 class. Francis will use the funding to hire engineers and continue improving Abel’s AI.
You might recognize Francis’ name: When Elon Musk was laying off thousands of Twitter employees in 2023, Francis playfully pretended online to be a disgruntled Twitter engineer — which led to him actually getting hired as a Twitter engineer. (By the way, Francis said it’s way more stressful working for Musk than sitting shotgun in a car chase. ‘If Elon yells at you, it’s terrifying,’ he laughed.)
Francis’ pivot from social media into police tech was prompted by a series of unfortunate events. In 2022, Francis helped a close friend escape an abusive marriage, secretly relocating her and her child to a new home in the dead of night. ‘It was the most heart-pounding thing I’ve done, maybe in years,’ Francis recalled. ‘Under the cover of darkness, help my friend escape and drive away.’
But then her husband found her new address. ‘He would come over, banging on the door, yelling threats,’ he said. ‘This happened a few times, and each time, it took about 45 minutes for the Oakland Police Department to get there.’
Francis was struck by how long it took the police to arrive. He interviewed police officers, many of whom told him how catastrophically understaffed their departments were. He also learned that a police report can take 45 minutes to write, causing police to spend about one third of their time writing reports or other documentation. ‘This number changed my life,’ Francis said. ‘That’s an insane use of time.’
He became obsessed with how new AI models could cut down the time spent writing reports. He made the initial Abel demo with homemade body cam footage, roleplaying petty crimes like littering with his friends. ‘I’ve made enough demo videos now that I know every petty crime that won’t involve bystanders,’ he said.
Now Abel is being used by the police department in Richmond, California (and Francis has access to real body cam footage). He said police officers there have changed their work schedules around Abel: instead of pulling to the side of the road to spend 40 minutes on a report, they can save them until the end of the day and simply edit the first draft that Abel has already prepared.
Abel is not the only one working on AI police reports. Competitors range from Axon (makers of tasers and body cams) with its Draft One product to tiny startups like Policereports.ai.
Francis hopes that Abel will ease paperwork chores for cops. ‘It’s much better for everyone if the cops are not overworked, if the cops are not burning out,’ he said. ‘If they can actually show up and do the job that they signed up to do.’
Ref: techcrunch
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