By Beryl Lipton<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Axon has been adding AI to its repertoire, and it now features a whole \u201cAI Era\u201d bundle plan<\/a>. One recent offering is Draft One, which connects to Axon\u2019s body-worn cameras (BWCs) and uses AI to generate police reports based on the audio captured in the BWC footage. While use of the tool may start off as a free trial, Axon sees Draft One as another key product for capturing new customers, despite widespread skepticism of the accuracy of the reports, the inability to determine which reports have been drafted using the system<\/a>, and the liability they could bring to prosecutions<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2024, Axon acquired a company called Fusus<\/a>, a platform that combines the growing stores of data that police departments collect\u2014notifications from gunshot detection and automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems; footage from BWCs, drones, public cameras, and sometimes private cameras; and dispatch information\u2014to create \u201creal-time crime centers.\u201d The company now claims that Fusus is being used<\/a> by more than 250 different policing agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fusus claims to bring the power of the real-time crime center to police departments of all sizes, which includes the ability to help police access and use live footage from both public and private cameras through an add-on service that requires a recurring subscription. It also claims to integrate nicely with surveillance tools from other providers. Recently, it has been cutting ties, most notably with Flock Safety<\/a>, as it starts to envelop some of the options its frenemies had offered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the middle of April, Axon announced<\/a> that it would begin offering fixed ALPR, a key feature of the Flock Safety catalogue, and an AI Assistant, which has been a core offering of Truleo, another Axon competitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Flock Safety is another major police technology company that has expanded its focus from one primary technology to a whole package of equipment and software services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Flock Safety started with ALPRs<\/a>. These tools use a camera to read vehicle license plates, collecting the make, model, location, and other details which can be used for what Flock calls \u201cVehicle Fingerprinting.\u201d The details are stored in a database that sometimes finds a match among a \u201chot list\u201d provided by police officers, but otherwise just stores and shares data on how, where, and when everyone is driving and parking their vehicles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Founded in 2017, Flock Safety has been working to expand<\/a> its camera-based offerings, and it now claims to have a presence in more than 5,000 jurisdictions around the country<\/a>, including through law enforcement and neighborhood association customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Among its tools are now the drone-as-first-responder system<\/a>, gunshot detection<\/a>, and a software platform<\/a> meant to combine all of them. Flock also sells an option for businesses to use ALPRs to “optimize” marketing efforts<\/a> and for analyzing traffic patterns to segment their patrons. Flock Safety offers the ability to integrate private camera systems as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of what Flock Safety does now comes together in their FlockOS system<\/a>, which claims to bring together various surveillance feeds and facilitate real-time \u201csituational awareness.\u201d When you think of Motorola, you may think of phones\u2014but there\u2019s a good chance that you missed the moment in 2011 when the phone side of the company, Motorola Mobility, split off from Motorola Solutions<\/a>, which is now a big player in police surveillance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On its website<\/a>, Motorola Solutions claims that departments are better off using a whole list of equipment from the same ecosystem, boasting the tagline, \u201cTechnology that\u2019s exponentially more powerful, together.\u201d Motorola describes this as an “ecosystem of safety and security technologies” in its securities filings<\/a>. In 2024, the company also reported $2 billion in sales, but unlike Axon, its customer base<\/a> is not exclusively law enforcement and includes private entities like sports stadiums, schools, and hospitals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Motorola\u2019s technology includes 911 services, radio, BWCs, in-car cameras, ALPRs, drones, face recognition<\/a>, crime mapping, and software that supposedly unifies it all. Notably, video can also come with artificial intelligence analysis<\/a>, in some cases allowing law enforcement to search video and track individuals across cameras.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In January 2019, Motorola Solutions acquired Vigilant Solutions<\/a>, one of the big players in the ALPR market, as part of its takeover of Vaas International Holdings. Now the company (under the subsidiary DRN Data) claims to have billions of scans<\/a> saved from police departments and private ALPR cameras around the country. Marketing language for its Vehicle Manager system highlights that \u201cdata is overwhelming,\u201d because the amount of data being collected is \u201ca lot.\u201d It\u2019s a similar claim made by other companies: Now that you\u2019ve bought so many surveillance tools to collect so much data, you\u2019re finding that it is too much data, so you now need more surveillance tools to organize and make sense of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SoundThinking<\/a> began as ShotSpotter, a so-called gunshot detection tool that uses microphones placed around a city to identify and locate sounds of gunshots. As news reports of the tool\u2019s inaccuracy<\/a> and criticisms have grown<\/a>, the company has rebranded as SoundThinking, adding to its offerings ALPRs, case management, and weapons detection<\/a>. The company is now marketing its SafetySmart platform<\/a>, which claims to integrate different stores of data and apply AI analytics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2024, SoundThinking laid out its whole scheme in its annual report<\/a>, referring to it as the “cross-sell” component of their sales strategy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The “cross-sell” component of our strategy is designed to leverage our established relationships and understanding of the customer environs by introducing other capabilities on the SafetySmart platform that can solve other customer challenges. We are in the early stages of the upsell\/cross-sell strategy, but it is promising – particularly around bundled sales such as ShotSpotter + ResourceRouter and CaseBuilder +CrimeTracer. Newport News, VA, Rocky Mount, NC, Reno, NV and others have embraced this strategy and recognized the value of utilizing multiple SafetySmart products to manage the entire life cycle of gun crime\u2026. We will seek to drive more of this sales activity as it not only enhances our system’s effectiveness but also deepens our penetration within existing customer relationships and is a proof point that our solutions are essential for creating comprehensive public safety outcomes. Importantly, this strategy also increases the average revenue per customer and makes our customer relationships even stickier.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Many of SoundThinking\u2019s new tools rely on a push toward \u201cdata integration\u201d and artificial intelligence. ALPRs can be integrated with ShotSpotter<\/a>. ShotSpotter can be integrated with the CaseBuilder records management system, and CaseBuilder can be integrated with CrimeTracer<\/a>. CrimeTracer, once known as COPLINK X, is a platform that SoundThinking describes as a \u201cpowerful law enforcement search engine and information platform that enables law enforcement to search data from agencies across the U.S.\u201d EFF tracks this type of tool in the Atlas of Surveillance<\/a> as a third-party investigative platform: software tools that combine open-source intelligence data, police records, and other data sources, including even those found on the dark web, to generate leads or conduct analyses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n SoundThinking, like a lot of surveillance, can be costly for departments, but the company seems to see the value in fostering its existing police department relationships even if they\u2019re not getting paid right now. In Baton Rouge, budget cuts recently resulted in the elimination of the $400,000 annual contract for ShotSpotter, but the city continues to use it<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n “They have agreed to continue that service without accepting any money from us for now, while we look for possible other funding sources. It was a decision that it’s extremely expensive and kind of cost-prohibitive to move the sensors to other parts of the city,” Baton Rouge Police Department Chief Thomas Morse told a local news outlet, WBRZ<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Government surveillance is big business. The companies that provide surveillance and police data tools know that it\u2019s lucrative to cultivate police departments as loyal customers. They\u2019re jockeying for monopolization of the state surveillance market that they\u2019re helping to build. While they may be marketing public safety in their pitches for products, from ALPRs to records management to investigatory analysis to AI everything, these companies are mostly beholden to their shareholders and bottom lines. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The next time you come across BWCs or another piece of tech on your city council\u2019s agenda or police department\u2019s budget, take a closer look to see what other strings and surveillance tools might be attached. You are not just looking at one line item on the sheet\u2014it\u2019s probably an ongoing subscription to a whole package of equipment designed to challenge your privacy, and no sort of discount makes that a price worth paying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To learn more about what surveillance tools your local agencies are using, take a look at EFF\u2019s Atlas of Surveillance<\/a> and our Street-Level Surveillance Hub<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over a decade ago I was watching a repossession specialist, and he was using a license plate reader that interfaced with a database flagging vehicles as he drove through parking lots with his tow truck. And on one repo he looked up a vehicle to see where it had been spotted previously by others. He […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11713"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11717,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11713\/revisions\/11717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.eff.org\/files\/banner_library\/surveillance-og-2.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nFlock Safety’s Bundles and FlockOS<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
flock_proposal_for_brookhaven.png<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/kittens.eff.org\/files\/flock_proposal_for_brookhaven.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nflock_proposal_for_brookhaven_2.png<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/kittens.eff.org\/files\/flock_proposal_for_brookhaven_2.png\")
flockos_hardware_software.png<\/a><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/kittens.eff.org\/files\/flockos_hardware_software.png\")
Flock is optimistic about its future, recently opening a massive new manufacturing facility<\/a> in Georgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMotorola Solutions’ “Ecosystem”<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
motorola_offerings_screenshot.png<\/a><\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/image-2-1024x668.png\")
SoundThinking’s \u2018SafetySmart Platform\u2019<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
Beware the Bundle<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n