Talk Around Town: A Maryland Sheriff's Office May Be Quietly Using AI to Write Sworn Court Docs

What Folks Are Whispering About

Well, slap a catfish and call it Tuesday—SMNEWSNET says it stumbled onto something real interesting buried inside a sworn court document. According to the local outlet, a St. Mary's County deputy disclosed right there in a probable-cause statement that the document had been produced with help from Code Four, a software outfit that describes itself as an AI-powered tool for law enforcement. That single sentence in a court filing, SMNEWSNET reports, is how the whole thing came to light—not from any press conference, not from a budget meeting, and sure as hell not from the Sheriff's Office hollering it from the rooftop.

Code Four, for its part, markets itself as a platform that can—according to the company's own product pages—generate warrant applications with auto-populated probable-cause statements and build case summaries by pulling details from records-management systems, audio, and phone data. The company says its tools are built to serve patrol officers, supervisors, detectives, and investigators across an entire department. Whether any of that wide-net description reflects what's actually running inside St. Mary's County remains, as of this writing, an open barn door.

What Is Actually Known for Certain

Here's the short list of things you can nail to the wall. One: SMNEWSNET reports that a deputy's own sworn filing disclosed that a probable-cause statement was generated in part using Code Four and that the deputy reviewed and corrected the document. That court record is an independently verifiable artifact, like finding a hog in your living room—hard to argue with once you see it. Two: SMNEWSNET confirms the Sheriff's Office has made no public announcement about adopting Code Four, disclosed no cost, described no extent of use, and shared no policy or safeguard framework governing the practice, as of September 22, 2026.

Three: Governor Wes Moore announced a statewide AI framework on September 22, 2026—confirmed by his official press release and independently covered by the Maryland Association of Counties—requiring that high-risk AI used by Maryland state agencies in law enforcement contexts be subject to Algorithmic Impact Assessments, bias testing, human oversight, and periodic auditing. That part is well-sourced and solid as a cast-iron skillet. Four: separately, the Park Record reports that Heber City Police Department in Utah purchased Code Four after a pilot, citing its ability to analyze both video and audio from body cameras to produce more detailed reports.

What Nobody Has Confirmed Yet

Lord have mercy, the unknowns here outnumber the knowns like gnats at a summer barbecue. The scope of Code Four's use inside the St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office is the big one. Code Four's own self-published case study—a single self-reported source that reads like a brochure your cousin printed at Kinko's—suggests broad adoption across the agency. But the Sheriff's Office has not confirmed, denied, or quantified a single thing. As of September 22, 2026, SMNEWSNET had received no records in response to its Maryland Public Information Act request.

That records request, SMNEWSNET reports, is asking for contracts, invoices, training materials, a list of which divisions and employees use Code Four, and documentation of whether AI-generated drafts, prompts, and audit logs are being kept. The outlet also says it is seeking records showing whether prosecutors, defense attorneys, or courts are being notified when a document was drafted with AI assistance—and what procedures exist for catching AI errors, including so-called hallucinations, before those documents get sworn and filed in court. None of those questions have public answers yet.

There is also the jurisdictional wrinkle that SMNEWSNET flags directly: Governor Moore's new AI guardrail requirements apply to state agencies, and the county sheriff's office is not a state agency. So even if every state department were locked down tighter than a tick on a hound dog, the county-level operation could theoretically keep right on going without those rules touching it. No official has clarified whether any voluntary or mandatory county-level standards apply here.

The Bigger Barnyard: AI in Law Enforcement Nationally

St. Mary's County is not operating in a vacuum, even if it's acting like it built one. Government Technology reports that Wicomico County, another Maryland jurisdiction, separately adopted a competing AI report-writing tool called Draft One for its sheriff's office—so this ain't exactly a one-mule situation. Meanwhile, Code Four describes its product line as serving multiple agency functions, according to the company's own marketing pages.

The broader debate over AI report-writing in policing is already simmering like a pot left on too long. The ACLU and critics of these tools have raised concerns that AI-generated documents could miss key facts or produce errors that slip past human review. Law enforcement agencies pushing the tools tend to emphasize efficiency. Neither side has weighed in specifically on the St. Mary's County situation yet, and no independent legal or civil-liberties organization has publicly commented on this particular case.

Analysis: Why the Silence Is the Story

This is analysis, not reporting—but the absence of any public communication from the Sheriff's Office is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. When an agency uses AI to help produce sworn documents that can send people to jail, and the public learns about it only because a deputy mentioned it in a court filing, that is a transparency gap wide enough to drive a pickup through. The fact that Code Four's own case study apparently describes broad deployment—while the agency itself says nothing—means the public is being asked to take a vendor's word for what their tax dollars are funding inside a law enforcement organization.

Governor Moore's framework, whatever its merits, arrives like a screen door on a submarine for county agencies: it doesn't automatically apply, and there is no visible mechanism forcing St. Mary's County to adopt equivalent standards. The outcome of SMNEWSNET's public-records request will likely determine whether this stays a whisper or becomes a proper reckoning. Until those records arrive—if they arrive—every claim about the scope and governance of Code Four's use in that office should be treated as unverified.