Apache Junction Police Department | Detective Division
There's a moment in every investigation when the weight of it hits you: the stacks of reports, the hours of footage, the sprawling datasets that have to be read, cross-referenced, and analyzed before a single meaningful lead can surface. For detectives, that mountain of work has always just been part of the job.
For Detective Eaton at the Apache Junction Police Department, TRULEO changed that reality entirely.
The case: a road rage incident on the highway. One vehicle cut off another, the driver got mad and opened fire. The suspect vehicle fled, leaving behind a general description and no license plate.
In the past, a case like this would have meant weeks of painstaking manual work: combing through Flock Safety camera data pulled from across the entire city, trying to cross-reference a vehicle description against hundreds, potentially thousands, of hits. It was the kind of investigation that could consume an entire detective's schedule for three weeks or more.
Detective Eaton had a different approach. He gathered every piece of available evidence: the case files, the witness accounts, the city-wide Flock data: and uploaded it all into TRULEO Analyst. Then he wrote a single, focused prompt:
"Analyze this Flock data and identify a possible lead for the suspect's vehicle."
TRULEO returned five vehicles: each one accompanied by a clear explanation of why it matched the description. The suspect's car was one of the five.
What would have taken three weeks took three days.
Detective Eaton said, "It did the research for me."
Detective Eaton didn't arrive at this level of proficiency overnight. It started the way it does for many officers: a colleague showed him what was possible. But Eaton had some prior experience with AI tools, and once he understood how prompting worked, he ran with it.
Today, when a new case lands on his desk, his process is deliberate and consistent. Before he makes a single move on an investigation, he uploads every available piece of evidence into TRULEO Analyst: case files, photos, video, cell phone data, Flock data, witness reports, and gets a complete picture of what he's working with.
From there, he runs a set of saved prompts that he's built and refined over time using these core prompts within TRULEO as his starting point:
"Give me an executive summary."
"Give me preliminary findings."
"What are your recommended next steps in the investigation?"
He's also built prompts for interview preparation: instructing TRULEO to generate questions for witnesses or victims formatted exactly the way he likes to conduct his interviews. His prompts aren't generic templates. They reflect how he thinks, how he works, and how his department operates.
The results have been measurable. What once took five hours of report writing now takes an hour or less. Investigations that once stretched across weeks are resolving in days.
"This is a game-changer for me, especially doing detective work. It's a lot of writing and reading. It made being a detective bearable."
What sets Detective Eaton apart isn't just how he uses TRULEO: it's what he does with what he learns. He shares his prompts with colleagues, helps others build workflows tailored to their own roles, and actively participates in the TRULEO Community to see how other agencies are pushing the tool forward. He personally helped the department's computer forensics detective build a prompt set designed around that specific workflow.
He's also identified what he sees as the next frontier: generating full operational plans and PowerPoint presentations directly from case data inside Analyst. For a search warrant, every detail is already there: he envisions simply prompting TRULEO to produce a complete ops plan, ready to brief. He's already working with the TRULEO Customer Success team to explore what's possible.
His ambition now is to train his entire department on prompting: to give every officer and detective access to the same efficiency he's found. Not by handing them his prompts, but by teaching them to build their own.
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