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."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 u...