Not even the police are safe from being locked into a product ecosystem 
Surveillance technology companies like Axon, Flock Safety, and Motorola Solutions are selling “public safety bundles” to police. After successfully selling one of their products, these vendors are incentivized to upsell additional tools and upgrades.
These bundles vary across companies, but they usually include surveillance tools like license plate readers, AI-assisted body cameras, and gunshot detectors. They can even provide access to footage from public and private cameras across the city.
xon has been adding AI to its repertoire, and it now features a whole “AI Era” bundle plan. One recent offering is Draft One, which connects to Axon’s 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, and the liability they could bring to prosecutions.
In 2024, Axon acquired a company called Fusus, a platform that combines the growing stores of data that police departments collect—notifications from gunshot detection and automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems; footage from BWCs, drones, public cameras, and sometimes private cameras; and dispatch information—to create “real-time crime centers.” The company now claims that Fusus is being used by more than 250 different policing agencies.
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, as it starts to envelop some of the options its frenemies had offered.
In the middle of April, Axon announced 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.
Do you think that these “public safety bundles” are another symptom of the surveillance-industrial complex? I personally find it hilarious that such doublespeak and marketing gibberish is making its way into law enforcement, but curious to hear what you think!