AI legal agent designed to guide police during domestic violence calls

Imagine being a police officer entering the chaos of a home where a husband is in the middle of beating his wife.

That alone would be enough to scare anyone, but maybe you’re also nervous because you’re new to the job, or overworked and exhausted, or rattled and struggling to focus because of the last call you took, or you yourself survived an abusive upbringing. Regardless of your personal conditions, once you’re inside the home of the alleged assaulter, you need to de-escalate any conflict, check for weapons, protect children, and collect conflicting testimony from the alleged perpetrator, victim, and witnesses while ensuring you don’t miss a single detail – or even a whole bunch of them – that could let the abuser escape justice and result in the survivor ... not surviving.

How are you supposed to do all that while fighting your own possible anger, fear, exhaustion, and more?

“There’s a huge cognitive load,” said Christina Shellabarger, PhD student at Washington State University, and a manager at WSU’s Complex Social Interactions (CSI) Lab in the College of Arts and Sciences. “You’re managing a fast-moving situation while trying to remember procedures, resources, and everything that needs to be documented.”

If you were in a Hollywood show featuring cops, forensics analysts, or even superheroes, you could rely on the so-called “man in the chair” (sometimes a woman in the chair), the off-site advisor who guides the investigator through stressful, frenetic, and rapidly changing conditions, either for the quickest escape or to ensure mission success in finding lost objects, information, or people.

But what if instead of a human in the chair, you could always depend on AI through your mobile device?

That’s what Shellabarger and other WSU CSI researchers have created: an open-source AI interaction platform that dynamically guides investigators not simply to ask all the right primary questions, but to probe further based on the specific information the officers are encountering and that the witnesses are reporting. It’s also an AI legal agent providing rapid interpretation of case law and statutes so that police can make more accurate decisions during first contact.

To make the CSI app even more effective, WSU is recruiting partners such as police departments and survivor advocacy groups for field testing of the open-source system, allowing participants to customize it for their own needs. As CSI Lab principal investigator and WSU professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology David Makin says, “We need people to use it and tell us what works and what doesn’t. This is about giving officers the right information at the right time so they can make better decisions when it matters most.”

By analyzing information as soon as officers record it in the app, the AI dynamically prompts further probing questions and recommends actions including contacting child protective services and other nearby services. It also translates languages, allowing people with limited or stress-impaired skill in the local language to communicate far more effectively.

One of the app’s key features is its standardized approach for collecting information, allowing individual officers and various departments and agencies to compare data and detect trends – especially from repeat offenders who may be escalating – more efficiently.

“You can start to see patterns you wouldn’t otherwise catch,” says CSI Lab computer scientist Shlok Tomar. “It’s not about collecting more data. It’s about collecting the right data and making it usable in the moment.” As CSI Lab staff scientist Sayani Ghosh says, “When the information is captured the same way each time, you can actually compare cases and understand what’s changing.”

Later this year WSU CSI will release the app’s beta version, and a stable one in early 2027. Plans for developing the app include automated keyword detection to prompt trauma-informed probing questions and even modified wording of those questions.

While countless observers including New Atlas have noted the dangers of embedding AI into policing, the WSU CSI app offers an opportunity to serve vulnerable people much better than police have typically done. As Makin notes, one of the key responsibilities of a state-funding institution is serving humanity. “This is exactly what a land-grant university is supposed to do. Take research out of the lab, build something useful, and put it in the hands of the people who need it,” he says.

Source: Washington State University