Flock is catching flak. Experts say other police surveillance tools are more worrisome
Police departments across the U.S. are increasingly adopting AI-powered real-time crime centers, such as Axon's Fusus, to aggregate data from cameras, sensors, and databases. Privacy experts warn that these integrated surveillance systems pose greater risks to civil liberties than individual tools like license plate readers.
Why it matters
The expansion of centralized, AI-driven surveillance infrastructure raises significant questions about privacy, data aggregation, and the extent of police monitoring in public spaces.
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.
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