Axon, the world’s largest vendor of police-worn body cameras, is moving into the business of capturing video taken by the public. In a survey emailed to law enforcement officials last month, the company formerly known as Taser International solicited naming ideas for its provisionally titled Public Evidence Product. According to the survey, the product will allow citizens to submit photos or video evidence of “a crime, suspicious activity, or event” to Evidence.com, the company’s cloud-based storage platform, to help agencies “in solving a crime or gathering a fuller point of view from the public.” Civil rights advocates interviewed by The Intercept were surprised to learn about the corporation’s latest initiative, seeing it as yet another untested effort to co-opt community oversight and privatize criminal justice. “When police body cameras were initially established, it was because citizens were clamoring for police accountability,” explained Shahid Buttar, director of grassroots advocacy with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But we’ve seen how cameras have been more useful for police investigations than for accountability. This product realizes those dangers and takes them to a new dystopian level by crowdsourcing the collection of evidence and turning it over to law enforcement.”

Body camera vendors like Taser originally pitched the collection of video evidence to lawmakers as a way to increase accountability, transparency, and trust between civilians and police. Three years and several million taxpayer dollars later, those promises have been called into question. Body camera footage has rarely been used to indict officers for brutality, and several states have introduced measures to restrict the public’s access to it. For privacy and civil rights organizations, enthusiasm about the technology has given way to growing concern about beat cops turning into walking surveillance cameras. Buttar and others fear that by adding civilian footage to Evidence.com, Axon is expanding this dragnet — and grabbing more data to feed its in-house “AI team.” Earlier this year, when Taser rebranded as Axon, it announced plans to apply deep learning algorithms to the thousands of hours of police video it stores on Evidence.com. Just as Google and Amazon turn profits through their intimate access to our patterns of attention and consumption, Axon’s ability to mine its ever-growing archive of police video will allow the company to gain an edge on its competitors. By running analytics on its video collection, Axon claims that departments will be able to automate their paperwork and “anticipate criminal activity.” Although Axon has signed lucrative contracts with the nation’s major police departments, it has offered the rest its hardware free of charge, since its revenue comes from monthly subscriptions to Evidence.com. Axon’s CEO has called this model “Dropbox for Cops.”

Axon’s new Public Evidence Product, Buttar explained, serves as yet another source of data the company can monetize. “There have been many cases where private corporations have leveraged databases not to improve safety but to extract rent from already impoverished communities,” he said. For instance, Vigilant Solutions, the company manufacturing automatic license plate readers, collects a service fee when departments use its technology to identify and ticket flagged plates. “Those kinds of abuses are likely to recur here.” Joshua Reeves, the author of “Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society,” sees Axon’s interest in soliciting personal cellphone footage as part of a “disturbing trend: the increasing privatization of what has previously been a public practice.” “This [trend] is happening in a million different ways, whether it’s people photographing evidence of crimes on Facebook or apps that allow you to take photographs and report other people’s parking violations. This is becoming more prominent, and more and more minute offenses are being drawn into this vast surveillance dragnet.” The introduction of a third party that mediates the interactions of police and citizens, Reeves noted, represents a fairly recent development. Tips and evidence are not just going straight to law enforcement; they’re also entering the strongbox of a “huge private data corporation,” complete with its own terms of service. “If Taser owns your data, you don’t own your data,” Reeves explained. “We don’t know how they are going to use it. Especially given the longtime collaboration with Taser and the security apparatus, that’s something that is particularly troubling.” An Axon spokesperson said the company does not generally comment on products that have yet to be released. The company did confirm, however, that the Public Evidence Product would be announced to the public in the coming weeks and that the product was designed to “help solve crimes or respond to incidents that impact public safety.”

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