With a growing roster of partners, Amazon has been peddling AI drone surveillance, gun detection and real-time crime center tech to law enforcement agencies, public records reveal.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/10/01/inside-amazons-aggressive-push-to-get-cops-using-ai-surveillance/
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00:00Today on Forbes, Inside Amazon's Aggressive Push to Get Cops Using AI Surveillance
00:06In mid-2023, the San Diego County Sheriff's Office was looking to improve its drone surveillance
00:13operations. Among those vying to help were typical law enforcement providers and one other,
00:20Amazon Web Services. The company pitched a prototype of an AI tool capable of detecting
00:26weapons or any object of interest in live surveillance photos and video, sending text
00:31alerts to cops with their location. San Diego County took a demo, but passed. Similarly, after testing
00:39out the live streaming software powering Amazon's Twitch gaming platform to stream its real-time
00:44drone footage, the agency went with a different provider, Nomad Media. But the world's biggest
00:50everything store will still collect a check on that deal. Nomad is closely partnered with
00:55Amazon Web Services, or AWS. It runs its software on AWS Cloud, and its object detection, should
01:03San Diego or other customers choose to use it, is powered by Recognition, Amazon's AI image
01:09and video analysis service. Nomad CEO Adam Miller told Forbes his company often goes to market
01:15with Amazon. He said, quote, we use a tremendous number of their AWS services. It's a model that's
01:24working well for Amazon and its partners as they seek to grab a slice of the $11 billion
01:28police tech market. Emails with police agencies up and down the West Coast show Amazon's law
01:35enforcement and school safety team, led by a former police officer from Washington State,
01:40is aggressively courting new customers. At conferences and parties with local and federal
01:45law enforcement, it's been promoting its own products and an expanding array of partner
01:49surveillance tools that run on its vast cloud infrastructure. Here's a list of some of them.
01:56Car tracking from $7.5 billion startup Flock Safety. AI for piecing together massive data sets
02:04with billions of records on U.S. citizens from Lucidus Tech, now owned by Flock. A collection of apps
02:11designed to be used in surveillance hubs known as real-time crime centers from $1.5 billion market cap
02:18company C3AI and smaller startups like Revere Technologies. Gun detection software from ZeroEyes,
02:26a startup with $80 million in funding. AI software that can help write police reports from startups
02:32Able Police and Mark 43. Various technologies from Veritone, a $444 million market cap business
02:40that makes AI that can identify and track individuals in surveillance footage or video
02:45posted to social media. And Leo Technologies' Virus product, which constantly monitors and transcribes
02:53prison inmate calls in, quote, near real time for AI-powered analysis.
02:59The emails with the police agencies, obtained via public records requests, suggest Amazon has been
03:05aggressively marketing surveillance tech to cops. In one message, Amazon's law enforcement and school
03:11safety lead gives the San Diego County Sheriff's Office the hard sell on Lucidus, writing, quote,
03:17It is one of the most amazing tools that I have seen for law enforcement and has so many applications
03:22that I don't want to skew where your mind will go with it. I think your jail intel group would lose
03:27their minds. At the time, Lucidus was marketing a, quote, person database containing more than 120
03:34billion records, which cops could use to search for social security numbers, addresses, emails, and
03:40more. In a November 2023 message to chiefs of police in King County, Washington, the same Amazon lead
03:48pitched a meeting to, quote, talk strategy around how to get zero eyes into your schools.
03:54In another, he urged the departments to, quote, get some countrywide momentum going to put
03:59Phlox license plate readers on the roads. When he heard the King County Sheriff's Office was looking
04:04for AI solutions in 2024, he sent another message, writing, quote, I want to get in front of whomever
04:11is running those projects to share the work that we are already doing with other agencies so this does
04:16not become a science project. An Amazon Web Services spokesperson said the emails obtained by Forbes
04:23were just business as usual. But privacy activists have long worried about Amazon's work with law
04:29enforcement. The company's facial recognition tools have been criticized for being bad at
04:34differentiating non-white faces. And earlier this year, it was lambasted for partnering with police tech
04:40giant Axon for a service allowing police to get footage from ring cameras. For full coverage, check out
04:47Thomas Brewster's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
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