00:00Today on Forbes, this billionaire's AI was supposed to speed up policing. It's not going well.
00:07In June 2022 in California, the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office organized what they called a
00:14quote, day of fun, down at the Coyote Point shooting range. The department's IT team and
00:20staff from C3AI, a $2.4 billion market cap company founded by billionaire Tom Siebel,
00:27were invited to celebrate their work on a new surveillance system intended to unify
00:31police data from agencies across the county into a single app. After lunch, C3AI staff could
00:38practice shooting targets at the same facility where the cops trained. The choice of venue was
00:43not accidental. In 2018, Siebel's foundation gave $4.5 million to the county to fund the range's
00:51refurbishment. Working closely with C3AI and its longtime partner, Amazon Web Services,
00:57the Sheriff's Office wanted to connect masses of data from at least 15 different agencies under
01:02its jurisdiction, collected from devices like license plate readers, surveillance cameras,
01:08arrest records, 911 calls, and historical police databases. At the core of Project Sherlock,
01:15named for Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective, was artificial intelligence that could piece the
01:20data together, find leads for investigators, and give situational awareness to cops on the beat.
01:26The ultimate aim was to dramatically speed up the grunt work of policing.
01:30For C3AI, Sherlock was set to be a flagship contract for the company's local government division.
01:37And so crucial was it that Siebel himself was deeply involved in the early stages of the work,
01:42down to writing sections of the contract and hosting San Mateo cops at his offices in Redwood City.
01:47But $12 million and three years later, Project Sherlock has struggled with usability issues,
01:54feature oversights, and significant delays, in some cases well over a year,
01:59according to public records obtained by Forbes. A timeline of the planned Sherlock rollout,
02:05obtained via public records, showed that 14 agencies were due to go live with Sherlock by January this
02:10year at the latest. Seven of those agencies, Atherton, Belmont, East Palo Alto, Foster City,
02:18Menlo Park, San Bruno, and South San Francisco, told Forbes that they didn't have access to a fully
02:23functional product and therefore hadn't seen any investigational benefit. The San Mateo County Sheriff's
02:30Office claimed that in fact the Foster City and San Bruno Police Departments did have access,
02:34along with Daly City, Redwood City, and San Mateo. The agency didn't clarify, however,
02:41whether officers at onboarded agencies were actively using Sherlock or if they were like
02:46Foster City, which was due to go live as of May 31st last year, but, per Chief Corey Call,
02:52was, quote, not seeing any benefits yet as this project is still in the developmental stages.
02:58Similarly, San Bruno's former interim chief, Susan Manheimer, told Forbes in June,
03:03the department was using a limited beta version of Sherlock.
03:07Menlo Park Police Department Chief David Norris said all 14 agencies were, quote,
03:12behind the implementation schedule in the timeline. Norris said, quote,
03:17while the technology itself is onboarded, the practical implementation has been delayed.
03:23Belmont Lieutenant Clyde Hussey, his department's project manager for Sherlock,
03:28confirmed the delays, adding that he was unable to explain them. He said, quote,
03:33I wish I had a good answer for you. After this story was first published last week,
03:38Hussey said some select staff were recently given access.
03:42The other agencies didn't respond to requests for comment.
03:46The stuttering progress of Project Sherlock, the name and nature of which has been reported by
03:51Forbes for the first time, shows how even with the backing of a Silicon Valley billionaire in Siebel,
03:56and one of the world's most powerful companies in Amazon,
04:00AI's much-hyped use in policing is running into bureaucratic stumbling blocks
04:04and problems performing as promised.
04:06In San Mateo County, the hope that AI plus mass collection of surveillance data
04:11would get vital information into the hands of cops faster has yet to be fully realized.
04:16For full coverage, check out Thomas Brewster's piece on Forbes.com.
04:23This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
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