By Rajwa Quasim
From a Harvard Law School dropout to building a startup that raised $6 million, David Lawrence and his co-founders founded Blue Voice to help police officers access real-time, department-specific laws and procedures while working in the field.
Lawrence founded Blue Voice, a Boston-based AI startup, after an on-campus shooting involving a police officer sparked controversy over police conduct while he was studying at Harvard Law School. He believed that many policing errors occur when officers lack immediate access to department rules and procedures or have to read 1,000 pages or more of documents. This means they have to make decisions relying on their memory of thousands of pages of laws, policies and local regulations. He dropped out of Harvard and developed an AI-based solution.
Lawrence teamed up with another Harvard MBA graduate and former Google engineer Amit Patankar and retired Boston police deputy chief Michael Gropman to launch Blue Voice. The company emerged from stealth on Aug. 31 after three years of development. The funding was led by venture capital firms SignalFire and Las Olas VC.
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He does not regret dropping out of Harvard. “This is the best thing I could do with my career and the most impact I could potentially make,” he said. Prior to developing Blue Voice, Lawrence worked for Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont.
Blue Voice said its platform is already being used daily by officers at 225 county agencies across 25 U.S. states, making the platform a domain-specific assistant rather than a general chatbot. Lawrence has said consumer AI models deliver incorrect answers up to 30% of the time, which is why Blue Voice is helpful. It provides accurate data that is not available through general chatbots. It has also developed functionality to help detectives solve cold cases.
The system is designed to point out the exact regulation that applies to a situation while leaving the final decision in the hands of humans rather than having AI tell officers what to do. Beyond policy lookups, it will also give officers instant access to detailed school maps during active-shooter situations.
Lawrence described a case in which a young officer used Blue Voice to confirm that a man attempting to lure a girl into his car met the legal threshold for child enticement. The officer then intervened and helped the child in time. He described another incident in which the platform reminded an agency head that an officer needed an independent mental health evaluation before returning to duty following a shooting. Lawrence said the company answers at least one question every minute.
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He told TechCrunch that, “When an officer makes a decision, they do so from memory or best guess, based on thousands of pages of law, policy, municipal ordinances, and state laws that they’ve internalized and keep in their head. […] Before Blue Voice, an officer who couldn’t recall a specific protocol — like the exact seventh step required at a crime scene — had few good options: Flip through a 15,000-page manual, wake up a supervisor in the middle of the night, or search generic tools like Google or ChatGPT that lack police-specific training. The problem was that traditional methods took too much time, while consumer AI models delivered incorrect answers up to 30% of the time.”
As police use of Lexipol has drawn criticism, Lawrence believes that AI can provide public safety benefits if it is designed in a way that ties directly to verified legal sources.