When police officers interact with someone during a traffic stop or just a resident in need of help, it's hard to know ahead of time if that person is, say, autistic or has another neurodivergent condition.
But now officers in the Fort Worth Police Department are getting to practice these types of interactions — and learn the signs of various conditions — thanks to a new AI training tool developed by a UT Arlington professor.
"We can create lots of different difficulty levels for the officers who are training," says Dr. Shuchi Deb, an associate professor in UT Arlington's Department of Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering. "So, some of the AI can be very compliant, some of them are not that compliant - some of them can be impossible to de-escalate."
Fort Worth police officer Jorge Lopez worked with Dr. Deb to develop the training and says there are obvious advantages to employing AI.
"With AI, it takes out the need for a physical human role player, it takes out safety considerations because there's no physicality to it," he says. "So, it's something that we can do a lot more often in training."
