Henderson Police Chief Marcus Barrow calls himself an “old-school” police officer, but that doesn’t transfer to the officers in his department – he wants the younger officers to bring their technological skills with them – from flying drones to using AI to streamline inter-office guidelines.
“I think we’re probably a step ahead of everybody in the region,” Barrow said on Tuesday’s TownTalk. Besides using facial recognition software to help solve crimes, the city of Henderson also has more FLOC cameras in use than nearby municipalities.
“We’re the smallest agency in the United States to have a NIVEN entry site,” Barrow continued. NIVEN analyzes shell casings to aid in police investigations.
And there are the drones, a tool that he said will most likely continue to grow, based on what he hears at conferences and reads in professional publications.
Mixing in the use of the latest technology means that the department is constantly learning and adapting to new concepts and equipment while maintaining high expectations for police performance.
Each year, the police department must be reaccredited through CALEA, the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies. There’s a site visit every four years now, and March 2025 marks the eighth time the police department has received its reaccreditation certificate.
“We’ve been working on accreditation since I got here in 1998,” Barrow said. There are 461 standards to meet.
The CALEA standards include every facet of police work, from swearing in of officers to how arrestees are processed to how documents and other material is stored electronically.
Barrow said Capt. Chris Ball informed him recently that there soon will be two more added to the list – one involving how the department uses AI in its daily duties.
AI can be a very useful tool, but Barrow said he, like others in law enforcement, want to see how the courts system accepts the use of AI.
He said one of the first questions a judge may ask an officer providing testimony is whether his report is in his own words. Of course, an AI-generated report may not satisfy that question, so Barrow said he’d like to see AI used to make something better, not as a replacement for an officer-generated report.
Take policy manuals, for example, he said. A policy manual could be cranked into an AI program and it could quickly spot inconsistencies and redundancies.
That’s using technology in a way that makes things better.
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