A police officer monitors video surveillance in the real-time crime center of the Irvine Police Department in California in 2024. It is unclear whether Irvine uses Axon Fusus surveillance software or other software in its crime center.
Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Subscribe via Getty Images
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Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Subscribe via Getty Images
Police officers in American cities are quick to extol the virtues of real-time crime centers, which help them find missing children, monitor major events from the sky and spot dangerous scenes before putting a police officer in danger.
Hundreds of police departments have one of these central hubs, which have been around for years. But many of them now use AI software, like Fusus, from 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 brains of a crime center, synthesizing the data it retrieves and allowing police command centers to monitor an entire city from a single location.
Herd cameras, automated license plate readers (LPR), 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 following the Flock debate with a bit of perplexity,” says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University. “Because real-time crime centers not only have cameras and ALPR sensors, but also video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a single pane of glass visual view of what’s happening in a city, with time machine capabilities that allow you to go back and investigate crimes.”
How AI-powered software is powering crime centers in real time
Tools like Axon Fusus, which is a leader in this type of software, also extract images and data from police cameras, law enforcement dashcams, 911 emergency service, gunshot detectors and surveillance cameras, sometimes including those from private companies that opt for this option.
Its use is growing rapidly. In 2024, technology news site 404 Media reported that just over 100 law enforcement agencies had deployed Fusus, which was then its own company and had been 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 from departments that use Fusus told NPR that the tool allows their agencies to save time and multiply forces.
“We could put analysts in a room and give them access to 40 different systems,” says Benjamin Weir, a captain with the Oklahoma City Police Department. “But it slows them down. So the biggest leverage factor for a real-time information center to be productive is to have software that can incorporate all of these things into one usable area.”
Quincy Whitner, a lieutenant with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina, says Fusus helped his department track down a man who shot a police officer and fled the scene, by combining city surveillance footage with license plate data.
“Instead of having to go to a million different systems, a million different places to find answers, we can get them on one platform, in one place, almost instantly,” Whitner says.
Privacy concerns when monitoring is easy
But this push-a-button mentality is exactly what makes privacy experts nervous.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, says that even a few decades ago, there were even more hurdles to overcome when police wanted to surveil community members. They may need to physically follow someone or conduct surveillance. This took time, staff and resources.
“In addition to all the things that we want to put in place and which require a kind of criminal predicate to launch it, there is precisely this kind of organic friction which imposes certain constraints,” she says. “As this friction disappears, it becomes easier and easier to conduct investigations, examine people and even extract information on a large scale.”
Police told NPR they understand those concerns, but that the good — the potential to stop and solve crime — outweighs the bad — the potential for misuse and mass surveillance.
“I understand people’s concerns, but if you’re up to no good, we’re not watching you. We’re watching people who commit crimes,” says Michelle Iezzi, deputy director of the operational intelligence division at the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland.
Axon did not respond to multiple requests for comment. But CEO Rick Smith said on the latest earnings call that the company values privacy: “We just have to be thoughtful and understand those concerns and say, ‘Look, this is a tool to amplify human capabilities, not to replace human judgment.'”
But there is broad potential for abuse when a police department is constantly monitoring, privacy experts say; surveillance technology can mistakenly sweep up innocent people and allow them to be targeted.
“What happens if a government wants to silence a particular group or even a particular person? And you just build a surveillance architecture that makes that extremely simple,” says Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University.
Courts are moving slowly to decide when and if this type of surveillance crosses a constitutional line. In the meantime, Ferguson says, lawmakers could act by limiting how long data is stored, for example by requiring regular audits or restricting surveillance near sensitive sites like abortion clinics or immigration courts.
He says these conversations should happen before a tool is used.
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