Police in West Palm Beach can now describe a suspect's shirt color and have AI search every camera in the city. The governor is already warning it's gone too far.
West Palm Beach's police department is investing millions of dollars in AI programs. City officials say the tools will help offset officer shortages and improve public safety.
What the Department Is Actually Buying
The department's homeland security manager, Paul Allen, outlined three AI programs in an Aug. 3 presentation to city commissioners.
BriefCam lets AI search hundreds of hours of camera footage by physical description alone. "All we have is information that the suspect is wearing tan pants and a black shirt," Allen said. "We can type that in now into the AI database."
Peregrine pulls together police reports, interviews and camera footage to surface investigative leads and patterns. Allen said agencies that already use it called it "a game changer for the entire department."
Axon transcribes the department's video, including body camera footage, into searchable text. "All our historical video that has been collected and our current video will now be transcribed into PDF, into text," Allen said.
Where the Money Is Coming From
The city's Community Redevelopment Agency is funding the purchases through a roughly $10 million push into what it calls "innovative policing."
CRA Executive Director Chris Roog said the agency originally planned to spread the spending over several years. It decided to fund it all at once instead. Mayor Keith James called the initiatives "very exciting."
The Governor Is Already Pushing Back
That spending places West Palm Beach inside a fast-growing national fight over AI-powered policing. It's a fight that has reached the governor's office directly.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said in late August that automated license-plate reader cameras have grown "out of control" across Florida. He warned the state could become "a surveillance state" without new legal limits.
"I don't want to be in a situation where these tech companies, a handful of tech companies, know everything about you and know where you're going," DeSantis said.
Where the Legal Gap Actually Sits
There's currently no federal privacy law governing this kind of policing technology. A handful of states, including Maine and New Hampshire, have already passed restrictions on automated license plate readers.
Robert Wilkins is a West Palm Beach attorney who co-chairs the Florida Bar's Cybersecurity and Privacy Law Committee. He says that gap is the real issue.
"The question becomes how is it used, how is it retained," Wilkins said. "If you have no regulations regarding what's being collected, then you have no idea how it's being used, who's monitoring it."
DeSantis said he's studying New Hampshire's law directly and plans to propose new restrictions of his own for Florida.
What Comes Next for South Florida
Peregrine's own growth in Florida has been fueled partly by state grants. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has distributed millions in grant funding this year specifically for agencies to buy Peregrine's software.
For West Palm Beach, that puts the city ahead of the regulatory framework. The rules that would govern how its new AI tools actually get used haven't caught up yet. The technology is already live. The rules are still being written.
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