David Lawrence was a student at Harvard Law School when a police shooting on campus sparked a heated debate about police conduct. After realizing that most police mistakes occur when officers don’t have immediate access to department rules, Lawrence dropped out to use AI to tackle the problem. He teamed up with co-founders Amit Patankar, a Harvard MBA and former Google engineer, and former Boston Police Deputy Chief Michael Gropman to launch Blue Voice, a Boston-based AI startup that provides real-time policy guidance to officers in the field.
Three years later, Blue Voice is coming out of stealth with $6 million in funding led by SignalFire and Las Olas VC. Currently, employees in 225 county offices in 25 states rely on this tool every day to ensure their actions follow departmental protocols. Lawrence likens the platform to Harvey, an AI tool widely used by lawyers, and OpenEvidence, a similar tool for doctors.
“When police officers make decisions, they make decisions based on memory and guesswork, based on thousands of pages of laws, policies, local ordinances, and state laws that they have internalized and have in their heads,” Lawrence told TechCrunch.
Before Blue Voice, police officers who couldn’t remember a specific step, such as the exact seventh step required at a crime scene, had few good options: flipping through a 15,000-page manual, waking up a supervisor in the middle of the night, or searching common tools like Google or ChatGPT without police-specific training. The problem, Lawrence said, was that traditional methods were too time-consuming, while consumer AI models could give incorrect answers up to 30% of the time.
Blue Voice says it can solve this problem because its general-purpose AI tools are trained on sector-specific laws, local ordinances, protocols, and guidelines that are not accessible on the public internet. The platform also gives police officers instant access to detailed maps of schools on their phones in the event of an active shooter emergency.
Currently, Blue Voice answers questions every minute. Lawrence said officers rely on the tool with confidence because it always points directly to its own regulations, rather than generating the answers on its own like ChatGPT does. The tool does not dictate action, it simply provides the law, and the final decision rests with the police officer, who combines it with his own field experience.
Lawrence said BlueVoice’s customer base has grown 11 times in the last year as police departments see tangible results such as lower crime and fewer operational disputes.
Lawrence said Blue Voices recently helped thwart a kidnapping after a rookie police officer spotted a man pressuring a young woman to get into his car. Unsure whether there was a legal basis to intervene, the officer consulted Blue Voice over the phone. The app immediately confirmed that the situation met the legal criteria for “child enticement” (a crime that covers attempts to seduce minors with the intent to commit a crime against them) and authorized him to take immediate action.
In another example, Blue Voices reminded chiefs that police officers cannot be returned to active duty after a shooting without undergoing an independent mental health evaluation.
Competites, a startup that competes with PE-backed Lexipol, also recently developed capabilities to help detectives solve cold cases.
Amid growing criticism of police use of AI, such as Flock Safety’s license plate monitoring system, Lawrence hopes BlueVoice will prove that properly implemented AI can benefit public safety without sacrificing civil rights.
Lawrence, who previously worked for Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, said he developed a deep passion for public service and has no regrets about leaving law school. “This is the best thing I can do in my career and the biggest impact I can potentially have,” he said.
Top, left to right: Michael Gropman, David Lawrence, Amit Patankar.
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