Developing Speech Processing Pipelines for Police Accountability

06/09/2023

∙

by   Anjalie Field, et al.

∙

0

∙

share

Police body-worn cameras have the potential to improve accountability and transparency in policing. Yet in practice, they result in millions of hours of footage that is never reviewed. We investigate the potential of large pre-trained speech models for facilitating reviews, focusing on ASR and officer speech detection in footage from traffic stops. Our proposed pipeline includes training data alignment and filtering, fine-tuning with resource constraints, and combining officer speech detection with ASR for a fully automated approach. We find that (1) fine-tuning strongly improves ASR performance on officer speech (WER=12-13 community member speech (WER=43.55-49.07 officer speech detection and diarization remain challenging. Our work offers practical applications for reviewing body camera footage and general guidance for adapting pre-trained speech models to noisy multi-speaker domains.