HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Spokane, Washington, Police Reportedly Circulated Purported AI-Generated Image as Authentic Photo of Injured Dog

July 1, 2026

Detectives in Spokane, Washington, reportedly created a purported AI-generated image as a joke depicting a real undercover officer holding an injured dachshund. A supervisor reportedly mistook it for an authentic photograph and the image was released to news media after correcting an earlier claim that the dog had died. The Spokesman-Review published a cropped version before the department disclosed that the scene was fabricated and began reviewing its verification procedures. This incident highlights the need for rigorous AI governance and harm prevention measures to ensure public trust in law enforcement. Through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about responsible AI practices and guardrails for AI.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
spokane-police-department, law-enforcement, synthetic-media-creators
Alleged developer
synthetic-media-generation-technology-developers, synthetic-image-generation-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
epistemic-integrity, general-public, general-public-of-spokane-washington, journalistic-integrity, the-spokesman-review, undercover-law-enforcement-officers, law-enforcement, privacy, news-organizations

AI governance case studies

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1597

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.