StenoAI for Law Enforcement
Briefings, investigation reviews, witness contact and command meetings carry personal data your force is accountable for under Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018. StenoAI records, transcribes and summarises on the laptop in the room, or on infrastructure the force controls. It is not an interview recorder and never replaces your authorised PACE equipment.
01 / Where it is used
Illustrative settings · 8Settings where the conversation can’t be handed to a cloud vendor, and the record StenoAI produces in each, on your device or your infrastructure.
A verbatim record before the statement is drafted.
ForInvestigators, statement takers, victim liaison
Decisions and rationale, ready for the policy file.
ForSenior investigating officers, review teams, disclosure officers
A decision log grounded in what was said.
ForCommand teams, public order and event planners
Sensitive personnel data kept off vendor servers.
ForProfessional standards departments, HR, staff associations
One record for the room, held by the chair.
ForMASH teams, MARAC and MAPPA coordinators
Ask across every meeting, inside the force boundary.
ForIntelligence units, tasking and coordination groups
Learning captured while it is fresh.
ForPublic order trainers, incident debrief leads
Review the source, build it, stage it.
ForForce IT, information security, DPOs
02 / Why now · Public record
Verified October 2026Government is funding AI across policing, and note taking is named among the priorities. The covenant every chief signed says a human decides. Both point the same way: transcript first, inside the force.
Sep 2023 NPCC
The NPCC Covenant for Using AI in Policing, endorsed by all members on 28 September 2023, says all AI that affects the public must have a human as the ultimate decision-maker.
Mar 2025 Surrey and Sussex
The Police and Crime Commissioner for Sussex published a planned procurement for an automated transcription solution for Surrey and Sussex Police, estimated at £100,000 excluding VAT.
Jun 2026 Home Office
The Home Office factsheet lists note taking and transcribing witness statements among back-office uses, and says police AI deployments must be lawful, ethical and transparent.
Jun 2026 Home Office
PoliceAI is backed by £75 million over three years, with large-scale pilots in up to 10 forces over 2026-27 before scaling to all forces.
03 / Structural risk
3 pointsIn local mode, capture, transcription and summarisation run on the device. There is no vendor system holding the audio, so there is no processor contract to manage for it.
Summaries are drafts. The verbatim transcript is kept alongside, so every decision log entry can be checked against what was actually said.
Recordings, transcripts and summaries are ordinary local files your disclosure officer can retain, schedule and reveal under your own rules.
Open source. Force IT and information security can read the code, build it themselves and test it before deployment.
04 / Law & policy
Verified October 2026None of this is legal advice, and no tool hands you compliance. These are the rules a police DPO, disclosure officer and information security lead will test the design against.
05 / Case files · Public record
Verified September 2026Neither policing case below was a hack. In one, a force leaned on an assistant's output it could not check; in the other, a file carried more than anyone meant it to. Both are about where the record lives and what it can be checked against.
Case 01 West Midlands Police · 2025–2026
West Midlands Police relied in part on Microsoft Copilot output describing a football match that had never taken place, in advice that fed a decision to ban away fans from a fixture. After the error came to light, the Chief Constable retired and the assistant was switched off across the force.
What StenoAI changes
Any language model can get things wrong, including the one StenoAI runs. The difference is what the output can be checked against: StenoAI summarises only what was said in the meeting, and keeps the verbatim transcript next to every summary, so a claim in the notes can be traced to the words behind it — or found to have none.
Case 02 Police Service of Northern Ireland · 2023, fined 2024
In August 2023 PSNI published a spreadsheet in response to a Freedom of Information request. A hidden tab held the surnames, initials, ranks and roles of all 9,483 officers and staff. The Information Commissioner fined the service £750,000 in October 2024.
What StenoAI changes
No software stops a person releasing the wrong file, and StenoAI doesn't claim to. What it avoids is adding copies: no vendor-side duplicate of your meetings, no automatic sync, no export in the pipeline. The notes sit on a device under the controls you already run.
Case 03 Otter.ai litigation · 2025
Class actions consolidated as In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation in the Northern District of California allege that the AI notetaker joined calls and recorded participants who were not its customers, transmitted call content to its servers, and used those conversations to train its models. The claims are unproven and Otter.ai disputes them.
What StenoAI changes
Once a notetaker sends audio off the device, consent, retention and model training become somebody else's policy. In local mode StenoAI never sends the audio anywhere, so those questions stay with the force.
Each incident is a matter of public record, summarised from the linked source and verified September 2026. StenoAI is not affiliated with any organisation named here.
06 / Not for
4 linesLines StenoAI does not cross, and is never presented as crossing.
Interviews with suspects use your authorised recording device under Code E. StenoAI is not that device.
Not for product obtained under covert powers.
It does not analyse or transcribe body-worn footage.
Summaries are drafts. A person decides, on the transcript and the evidence.
On compliance
In local mode, StenoAI runs entirely on your device. Your meeting recordings, transcripts, and summaries never reach our servers — there is no third-party processor handling your meeting data, which addresses a meaningful part of HIPAA, GDPR, and data-residency exposure. (Those frameworks also cover safeguards, agreements, and processes that remain your responsibility — no tool hands you compliance.) StenoAI itself isn't a certified cloud service, because there is no cloud service handling your meetings to certify — and that's the point: the vendor-breach risk that frameworks such as SOC 2 exist to assure against isn't in that path.
07 / Questions
No. Interviews with suspects under caution must be recorded on your authorised recording device under PACE Code E. StenoAI is for the work around an investigation — briefings, reviews, command and partner meetings — under your force policy.
In local mode there is no processor in the audio path: recording, transcription and summarisation happen on the device. If you configure a model server, it is one your force operates or contracts for. Your DPIA, records of processing and endpoint security remain your responsibility.
Yes. Transcription runs on the device by default, and summaries can run on a model server on the force network or in the force's own cloud tenancy. It also runs fully offline on an isolated machine.
Download the open-source app for a single-officer evaluation, have your information security team review and build the source, or request a briefing to discuss a force deployment.
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