I'm an active, sworn law-enforcement officer in Illinois with roughly a decade in the profession: patrol, investigations, crisis and hostage negotiation, community policing, Field Training Officer. I built Report Shield because I wanted a tool like this for myself.
My law-enforcement career began with academy training at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, under Academy Director Bobby Bollinger. One area that received particular emphasis there was report writing: documenting incidents thoroughly, accurately, objectively, and professionally.
Report writing wasn't treated as simply another administrative requirement. It was part of doing the job well. That lesson stayed with me.
I also hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in Art History from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and an associate degree in art. I've always had an interest in computers and technology, and as artificial intelligence developed, I became increasingly interested in what it could make possible for law enforcement.
I believe good officers never stop learning.
I've always taken pride in writing good police reports. Over time, I became increasingly aware of how much the quality of a report can affect the way an incident is understood. An officer can do excellent police work and still struggle to put everything they experienced into words.
Articulation matters. Objectivity matters. Organization matters. Context matters. Word choice matters. The officer writing the report knows what happened because they were there. The people reading it later weren't: a prosecutor, a defense attorney, a supervisor, or the officer themself, months or years later, relying on what was documented at the time.
Officers already have a tremendous amount on their plates, especially in smaller agencies, where there may be only one officer on shift. After an arrest, that same officer may still need to finish reports, affidavits, and charging paperwork before there's anyone else available to look it over.
Report Shield was designed to provide another layer of review: clarity, articulation, grammar, organization, objectivity, potentially missing information. It does not replace professional judgment, supervisors, prosecutors, department policy, training, or proper legal research. The officer remains the author of the report and remains responsible for its accuracy.
Officers generally don't intend to write something that sounds judgmental, biased, or as though it places blame on a victim, but wording can unintentionally communicate something different from what was meant. Report Shield can help identify language that may be unclear, unnecessarily subjective, or capable of being interpreted differently than the officer intended.
The goal isn't to change the facts or make every officer sound the same. The goal is to help officers communicate their own observations, actions, and experiences clearly, accurately, professionally, and objectively.
Most officers don't have the time or desire to learn how AI models work or how to build complicated prompts. They shouldn't have to. I wanted Report Shield to take that complexity away. An officer should be able to choose what they need and use the technology without first understanding everything happening behind the scenes.
Privacy and security mattered just as much as capability. I wouldn't want information from one of my own investigations, victims, witnesses, suspects, incidents, used to train an AI model. Report Shield is built around a controlled, private API environment, with submitted report information not used to train the underlying AI models.
An officer standing on the side of a highway shouldn't have to navigate numerous websites and menus just to find a resource they need. Report Shield brings law-enforcement tools and resources together in one place, accessible from both computers and mobile devices. Technology should work around the realities of law enforcement, rather than forcing officers to work around the technology.
The idea had been in my head for some time. What I hadn't done was finally sit down and build it, until April 2026, when I was involved in an on-duty vehicle crash returning from assisting another agency. I was fortunate, but sore, and away from work for a few days. I'm not particularly good at sitting around doing nothing, so I finally started building the idea I'd been thinking about.
I'm not a software engineer. I didn't have a development team or a roadmap. What I did have was nearly a decade of law-enforcement experience, an understanding of the problems I wanted to solve, a long-standing interest in technology, and the determination to figure things out as I went. I researched. I learned. I built things. I broke things. I figured out why they broke, fixed them, and kept going.
I didn't begin with all the technical answers. I began with something I believe was more important: I understood the job, I understood the problem, and I knew what I wanted the technology to accomplish for officers.
Law-enforcement equipment and technology can be expensive, and individual officers often spend their own money on the things that help them do their jobs. I didn't want Report Shield to become another useful tool an officer looks at and thinks, "That would be great to have, but I can't afford it." Good tools shouldn't only be available to the agencies and officers with the biggest budgets.
I didn't create Report Shield because I believe technology can replace police officers. I created it because I believe technology can help good officers become even better: a tool built around the realities of patrol, designed with privacy in mind, realistically affordable, and built to assist the officer without attempting to replace the person wearing the badge.