Cop Companies Want All Your Data and Other Takeaways from This Year’s IACP Conference

Artificial intelligence dominated the technology talk on panels, among sponsors, and across the trade floor at this year’s annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

IACP, held Oct. 19 – 22 in Boston, brings together thousands of police employees with the businesses who want to sell them guns, gadgets, and gear. Across the four-day schedule were presentations on issues like election security and conversations with top brass like Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. But the central attraction was clearly the trade show floor. 

Hundreds of vendors of police technology spent their days trying to attract new police customers and sell existing ones on their newest projects. Event sponsors included big names in consumer services, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Verizon, and police technology giants, like Axon. There was a private ZZ Top concert at TD Garden for the 15,000+ attendees. Giveaways — stuffed animals, espresso, beer, challenge coins, and baked goods — appeared alongside Cybertrucks, massage stations, and tables of police supplies: vehicles, cameras, VR training systems, and screens displaying software for recordkeeping and data crunching.

And vendors were selling more ways than ever for police to surveillance the public and collect as much personal data as possible. EFF will continue to follow up on what we’ve seen in our research and at IACP.

“All in On AI” Demands Accountability

Police are pushing forward full speed ahead on AI. 

EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance tracks use of AI-powered equipment like face recognition, automated license plate readers, drones, predictive policing, and gunshot detection. We’ve seen a trend toward the integration of these various data streams, along with private cameras, AI video analysis, and information bought from data brokers. We’ve been following the adoption of real-time crime centers. Recently, we started tracking the rise of what we call Third Party Investigative Platforms, which are AI-powered systems that claim to sort or provide huge swaths of data, personal and public, for investigative use. 

The IACP conference featured companies selling all of these kinds of surveillance. Also, each day contained multiple panels on how AI could be integrated into local police work, including featured speakers like Axon founder Rick Smith, Chula Vista Police Chief Roxana Kennedy, and Fort Collins Police Chief Jeff Swoboda, whose agency was among the first to use Axon’s DraftOne, software using genAI to create police reports. Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs were prominently featured by Skydio, Flock Safety, and Brinc. Clearview AI marketed its face recognition software. Axon offered a whole set of different tools, centering its whole presentation around AxonAI and the computer-driven future. 

The policing “solution” du jour is AI, but in reality it demands oversight, skepticism, and, in some cases, total elimination. AI in policing carries a dire list of risks, including extreme privacy violations, bias, false accusations, and the sabotage of our civil liberties. Adoption of such tools at minimum requires community control of whether to acquire them, and if adopted, transparency and clear guardrails. 

The Corporate/Law Enforcement Data Surveillance Venn Diagram Is Basically A Circle

AI cannot exist without data: data to train the algorithms, to analyze even more data, to trawl for trends and generate assumptions. Police have been accruing their own data for years through cases, investigations, and surveillance. Corporations have also been gathering information from us: our behavior online, our purchases, how long we look at an image, what we click on. 

As one vendor employee said to us, “Yeah, it’s scary.” 

Corporate harvesting and monetizing of our data market is wildly unregulated. Data brokers have been busily vacuuming up whatever information they can. A whole industry provides law enforcement access to as much information about as many people as possible, and packages police data to “provide insights” and visualizations. At IACP, companies like LexisNexis, Peregrine, DataMinr, and others showed off how their platforms can give police access to evermore data from tens of thousands of sources. 

Some Cops Care What the Public Thinks

Cops will move ahead with AI, but they would much rather do it without friction from their constituents. Some law enforcement officials remain shaken up by the global 2020 protests following the police murder of George Floyd. Officers at IACP regularly referred to the “public” or the “activists” who might oppose their use of drones and other equipment. One featured presentation, “Managing the Media’s 24-Hour News Cycle and Finding a Reporter You Can Trust,” focused on how police can try to set the narrative that the media tells and the public generally believes. In another talk, Chula Vista showed off professionally-produced videos designed to win public favor. 

This underlines something important: Community engagement, questions, and advocacy are well worth the effort. While many police officers think privacy is dead, it isn’t. We should have faith that when we push back and exert enough pressure, we can stop law enforcement’s full-scale invasion of our private lives.

Cop Tech is Coming To Every Department

The companies that sell police spy tech, and many departments that use it, would like other departments to use it, too, expanding the sources of data feeding into these networks. In panels like “Revolutionizing Small and Mid-Sized Agency Practices with Artificial Intelligence,” and “Futureproof: Strategies for Implementing New Technology for Public Safety,” police officials and vendors encouraged agencies of all sizes to use AI in their communities. Representatives from state and federal agencies talked about regional information-sharing initiatives and ways smaller departments could be connecting and sharing information even as they work out funding for more advanced technology.

“Interoperability” and “collaboration” and “data sharing” are all the buzz. AI tools and surveillance equipment are available to police departments of all sizes, and that’s how companies, state agencies, and the federal government want it. It doesn’t matter if you think your Little Local Police Department doesn’t need or can’t afford this technology. Almost every company wants them as a customer, so they can start vacuuming their data into the company system and then share that data with everyone else. 

We Need Federal Data Privacy Legislation

There isn’t a comprehensive federal data privacy law, and it shows. Police officials and their vendors know that there are no guardrails from Congress preventing use of these new tools, and they’re typically able to navigate around piecemeal state legislation. 

We need real laws against this mass harvesting and marketing of our sensitive personal information — a real line in the sand that limits these data companies from helping police surveil us lest we cede even more of our rapidly dwindling privacy. We need new laws to protect ourselves from complete strangers trying to buy and search data on our lives, so we can explore and create and grow without fear of indefinite retention of every character we type, every icon we click. 

Having a computer, using the internet, or buying a cell phone shouldn’t mean signing away your life and its activities to any random person or company that wants to make a dollar off of it.