Artificial intelligence has moved fast into everyday life, and law enforcement is no exception. Automated tools with machine learning features have been part of investigations since the early 2000s, but the last few years have brought a wave of new products that claim to change how investigations get done.
At a 2025 Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA) conference, 217 attendees were asked about their AI use. The results:
- 38% said they were already using AI
- 32% said they were evaluating AI tools
- 20% said they were not using AI
That’s more than two-thirds of respondents either using or actively looking at AI, and for good reason. Early evidence points to real time savings on research and documentation. Reported capabilities include:
- Identifying subjects and associates across jurisdictions using available records and data sources.
- Spotting suspicious financial activity across separate data sources
- Connecting patterns across cases and jurisdictions that might otherwise go unnoticed
Not every AI tool is built for this work, though. Consumer-grade AI, the kind found in search engines, laptops, and everyday apps, can draft an email or summarize a webpage. It wasn’t built for the standards investigators, prosecutors, and courts require. Because case integrity and courtroom defensibility are on the line, agency leaders need a real framework for vetting these tools before they buy.
Five areas for consideration before you buy
- Where the data comes from. Reliable investigations start with reliable data. Most AI tools rely on open-web scraping, data curation, or both. Web scraping pulls information from public websites and can turn up a lot of useful material, but it has limits. Data curation reaches specialized and proprietary sources, including records that require active management to stay current and accurate. The strongest tools combine both, so investigators can trust what comes back.
- Whether it’s built for investigations or just repurposed. Consumer AI carries real risk in this context: security gaps, unclear data retention, no chain of custody, and open questions about whether its output would even hold up in court. Those gaps can hand the defense an opening.
- Whether the output can be traced back to a source. This is where hallucinations and citations matter most. A hallucination is false or fabricated information the tool generates, often because it couldn’t find a real answer and produced one anyway. A citation points to a verifiable source for every claim. In the past two years, several legal cases have been damaged by consumer AI tools that cited case law that didn’t actually exist. If an investigator report contains fabricated information, it can compromise the chain of evidence. Purpose-built tools address this with audit trails that let investigators confirm every source themselves.
- Whether it actually saves time. The first 48 hours of an investigation matter. Work that used to take hours can, in some cases, be handled in minutes, freeing investigators for field follow-up and interviews instead of manual research.
- Whether it helps with reports, not just research. Report writing eats up hours too, and missing documentation can create risk later in a case. AI can draft summaries of case files, but only sourced summaries with inline citations are useful for law enforcement. Investigators still need to review and confirm those citations before anything goes in a final report.
Five questions worth asking any vendor
- Where does your data come from, and how do you prove it’s reliable?
- Can your tool’s output be traced back to its sources?
- How is law enforcement data protected?
- What time savings can you actually document?
- How does the tool support report writing and court documentation, including accuracy of its summaries?
Where CLEAR Investigate fits
Thomson Reuters built CLEAR Investigate to meet all five of these standards. It helps agencies meet these requirements through trusted data, AI-powered investigative workflows, and transparent AI designed for law enforcement. By accelerating research, automating time-intensive tasks, and enabling well-informed conclusions, it allows investigators to focus on the work that matters most. As agencies evaluate solutions, they should also consider a vendor’s ability to innovate and evolve with changing investigative needs.
Learn more about CLEAR Investigate
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