AI Is Changing Law Enforcement Faster Than Anyone Expected
Law enforcement today isn’t struggling with a lack of information.
It’s drowning in it.
On the newest episode of Breaking Battlegrounds, guest Aaron Zelinger — alongside San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow — pulled back the curtain on one of the biggest untold challenges facing modern policing: the sheer explosion of digital evidence and the growing role artificial intelligence may play in managing it.
The conversation revealed a system under pressure — and a technology that could fundamentally reshape how cases are built, solved, and prosecuted.
The Modern Investigator’s Problem
Host Sam Stone opened with a real-world example: a major case generating a flood of public tips — many useful, many not.
For investigators, this scenario is increasingly common.
According to Zelinger, the biggest misconception about AI in law enforcement is that it’s primarily about automation or replacing people. In reality, the urgent need is far more practical: helping human investigators keep up with the overwhelming volume of evidence now involved in modern cases.
Today’s prosecutors and detectives must sort through:
Massive tip lines
Phone data and digital forensics
Jail communications
Surveillance footage
Social media evidence
In many cases, that means terabytes of material per investigation.
The result is a growing bottleneck inside the justice system.
Where AI Actually Helps
Zelinger emphasized that AI’s most valuable role is not decision-making — it’s triage.
Properly deployed, these tools can:
Rapidly sort incoming tips
Flag relevant communications
Surface key connections across datasets
Highlight inconsistencies
Identify potentially exculpatory evidence
That last point is especially important.
AI isn’t just about building stronger cases. It can also help investigators eliminate innocent suspects faster, something District Attorney Dan Dow has stressed in past work on cold cases.
In other words, the technology — when used correctly — can improve both efficiency and fairness.
A System Under Strain
The discussion also pointed to broader pressures on law enforcement agencies.
Zelinger noted that since the mid-2010s, departments have faced a difficult combination of trends:
Rising data complexity
Staffing challenges
Shifting public attitudes toward policing
Increased investigative workloads
Even highly experienced investigators are now forced to spend enormous time simply reviewing raw material before they can begin building a case.
AI, proponents argue, may be one of the few tools capable of closing that gap.
The Stakes Going Forward
What emerged from the conversation is a picture of a justice system at an inflection point.
Artificial intelligence will not replace detectives or prosecutors. But it is rapidly becoming a force multiplier — one that could determine whether agencies can keep pace with the modern evidence environment.
The key questions ahead are not just technological.
They are institutional and ethical:
How should AI be integrated into investigations?
What safeguards are needed?
How do agencies maintain trust while adopting new tools?
As cases grow more data-heavy, those answers will only become more urgent.
Transcript
Sam Stone: Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren. I’m Sam Stone. As always, diving right into it, our first guests today are Aaron Zelinger and San Luis Obispo District Attorney Dan Dow. Aaron is the CEO of Closure, the first digital analyst for prosecutors, investigators, district attorneys, detectives in law enforcement. And we’re talking about the use of all these unbelievable and rapidly advancing new tools in law enforcement today.
Chuck Warren: Aaron and D.A. Dow, thank you and welcome to the program.
Aaron Zelinger: Thank you, it’s good to be with you.
Chuck Warren: So as I was driving into the studio this morning, I was listening to the news and they’re talking about this Gun 3 case here in Tucson, which is just baffling. And they were talking about they’re getting so many calls in with tips and a little bit of information. I’m sure half of it, if not more, is wacko. But how does AI help law enforcement and prosecutors sort through this information.
Aaron Zelinger: Yeah, it’s a fantastic question. I’ll hop in here D.A Dow. Before we dive in, I just want to say thank you for having us. And I’m particularly grateful to be on with with our partner, Dan Dow from San Luis Obispo District Attorney’s Office, someone who’s overseen multiple successful cold case prosecutions in the last few years alone. And I’m sure he’ll talk more about that soon.
But from my perspective, I think the big missing story with AI right now, everyone’s talking about efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. How we’re going to automate jobs. But in the law enforcement context, what’s happened recently is that the amount of evidence in these cases, whether it’s tips, whether it’s data coming from phones, terabytes and terabytes of data, whether it’s jail communications in California, many, many counties now have unfettered access to phones for their inmates.
The amount of evidence that your average investigator and prosecutor has to get through just to understand what’s going on in their case much less make a successful prosecution, has rapidly increased. All while experiencing the after effects of what happened, unfortunately, in 2016 and 2020 with massive spikes in crime, but also a change among many cities in the United States with respect to how they view law enforcement. So all these underlying factors are compounding to make it very, difficult for really well-meaning and extremely thoughtful law enforcement officials to do their jobs.
So when I think of a case Guthrie case, I imagine that those folks on the ground are just inundated with those calls. And what AI promises to do is not replace those investigators who are expert in their field, but instead to help them sift through all this overwhelming evidence, sometimes at odds with each other.
And also, this is a point that D.A. Dow has made in the past, but also help bring to light exculpatory evidence to help quickly eliminate potential suspects. So that’s a long-winded way of saying that I think AI plays a really important role in sifting through all this evidence and happy to share more about.
Listen to the full episode of Breaking Battlegrounds anywhere you stream your podcasts!