Police officers in cities across the U.S. are quick to extol the virtues of real-time crime centers as a game changer that helps them find missing children, monitor large events from the skies and scope out dangerous scenes before putting an officer in harm's way.
Hundreds of police departments have one of these central hubs, which have existed for years. But many are now being powered with AI software, such as Fusus, from the public-safety technology giant Axon.
Fusus, by Axon's own description, is a "rapidly deployable real-time crime center in the cloud." It functions like the brain of a crime center, synthesizing the data it pulls in and allowing police command centers to watch an entire city from one place.
Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers (ALPRs), have faced intense backlash in recent months amid stories of abuse. Yet privacy experts say they're just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to police surveillance.
"I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement," says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. "Because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what's going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime."
How AI-powered software fuels real-time crime centers
Tools like Axon Fusus, which is a leader in this type of software, also pull in footage and data from police body cameras, law enforcement dashcams, 911 dispatch, gunshot detectors and surveillance cameras, including sometimes those of private businesses that opt in.
Its use is growing fast. In 2024, the technology news site 404 Media reported that just over 100 law enforcement agencies had deployed Fusus, which was then its own company and was acquired by Axon that year. The number of law enforcement agencies using the tool has more than doubled since then, according to Axon.
Police officers in departments that use Fusus told NPR that the tool serves as a time-saver and a force multiplier for their agencies.
"We could put analysts in a room and have them access 40 different systems," says Benjamin Weir, a captain with the Oklahoma City Police Department. "But that slows them down. So the biggest leveraging factor for a real-time information center to be productive is to have software that can incorporate all these things into one usable area."
Quincy Whitner, a lieutenant with the Greenville County Sheriff's Office in South Carolina, says Fusus helped his department find a man who shot a police officer and fled the scene, by combining city surveillance footage with license plate data.
"Instead of having to go to a million different systems, a million different places to find answers, we can get it in one platform in one place somewhat instantaneously," says Whitner.
Privacy concerns when surveillance is easy
But that push-of-a-button mentality is exactly what makes privacy experts nervous.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, says even a few decades ago, there were more hurdles to overcome when police officers wanted to surveil members of the community. They might have to physically follow someone or do a stakeout. It took time, staffing and resources.
"In addition to all of the things that you would want in place requiring some kind of criminal predicate to launch it, there is just this kind of organic friction that imposes some constraints," she says. "As that friction gets lifted, it becomes easier and easier to do investigations, to look at people and even to pull up broad-scale information."
Police told NPR that they understand those concerns but that the good — the potential for stopping and solving crime — outweighs the bad — the potential for misuse and mass surveillance.
"I understand people's concerns, but if you're not up to no good, we're not looking at you. We are looking at people who are committing crimes," says Michelle Iezzi, deputy director of the Operational Intelligence Division at the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland.
Axon did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But CEO Rick Smith said on the latest earnings call that the company strongly values privacy: "We just have to be thoughtful and understand those concerns and say, 'Look, this is a tool to amplify human ability, not to replace human judgment.'"
But there is broad potential for abuse when a police department is always watching, privacy experts say; surveillance technology can sweep up innocent people by mistake, and it can enable targeting.
"What happens if there is a government that wants to silence a particular group or even a particular person? And you just built the architecture of surveillance that makes that super-easy," says Ferguson, the George Washington University law professor.
Courts are moving slowly in deciding when or if this kind of surveillance crosses a constitutional line. In the meantime, Ferguson says, lawmakers could act by limiting how long data is stored, for instance, mandating regular audits or restricting surveillance near sensitive sites like abortion clinics or immigration courts.
He says those conversations should be happening before a tool ever is used.
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