End Amazon’s Surveillance Partnership with Police
I don&#x27;t own any kind of security system or surveillance camera, and even I find this site and its claims incredibly skewed and hyperbolic. Let&#x27;s examine each major point on that page:<p>1. &quot;Racial profiling is at the heart of Amazon Ring’s business model. In partnership with the police, Amazon profits from and therefore fosters a culture of racist fear mongering.&quot;<p>Nope, what&#x27;s at the heart of Ring&#x27;s business model is people&#x27;s rational and completely legitimate desire to a) be safe, b) not fall victim to crimes, c) be made whole by bringing criminals to justice, and d) deter criminals by those consequences. This requires the cooperation of the police, city prosecution, and local governments of course - but having surveillance footage is a big benefit and peace of mind to residents, and a major aid to those involved in preventing and investigating crime.<p>2. &quot;Amazon Sells Police Partners Racist Technology&quot;<p>No, facial surveillance technology is not racist. First off, facial recognition algorithms do not take race as an input factor to make any kind of determination. Disparate outcomes, either in terms of arrests, commission of crimes, or false positives&#x2F;negatives, does not make this (or any other) system racist as long as explicit discrimination is not being performed based on race. This is the same debate that&#x27;s had between equity (equality of outcomes) and equality (equality of opportunity) in other situations. For example, college admissions are not racist just because some races have low representation relative to their population size. However, affirmative action is a systemically racist policy because it explicitly discriminates based on race. A similar line of thinking applies here. Secondly, false positives are fixed easily by having a human in the loop to verify matches, which all implementations of facial recognition in America use. Therefore, the false positive rate is no worse than humans and we still get the benefit of locating suspects from a large search space quickly and efficiently, so they can be brought to justice by police departments that have limited staff and resources.<p>3. &quot;After the murder of George Floyd millions of protesters took to the streets to oppose police violence and systematic racism. Cops used heavily invasive surveillance tools to identify, track, and even arrest activists exercising their First Amendment rights.&quot;<p>There isn&#x27;t any expectation of privacy in a public place. I can film you, you can film me, we both can film cops, cops can film us, and so on. That seems reasonable. It is also laughable to claim that those being arrested in these &quot;protests&quot; were merely exercising their first amendment rights. In my city, and numerous others across the country, we had mass rioting and people purposely antagonizing the police and looking for violent confrontation. We saw property damage, vandalism, arson, blockades of basic infrastructure, physical violence, many deaths, and even an attempt to seize public land and declare it a separate sovereign nation (CHAZ&#x2F;CHOP). Just perform a web search for what happened in DC, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and other cities in the days following the George Floyd incident and the rest of the year. A violent riot is not a protest, and participants in those crimes should have been arrested and prosecuted more quickly, if anything.<p>4. &quot;While activists call for the defunding of police forces, Amazon is doing everything they can to solidify themselves as an extension of law enforcement.&quot;<p>White leftist activists may be calling for defunding of police forces, but minorities don&#x27;t want that. An overwhelming majority of Black Americans want to retain local police presence (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;316571&#x2F;black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.gallup.com&#x2F;poll&#x2F;316571&#x2F;black-americans-police-r...</a>). The push for defunding is entirely a luxury belief, likely held by those who are shielded from the realities of crime.<p>5. &quot;Amazon creates dangerous technology marketed to make policing faster, cheaper, and more efficient in social control. This automated surveillance technology enables mass scale policing that can monitor everyone everywhere...Amazon’s surveillance empire will only solidify the police state.&quot;<p>Facial recognition shouldn&#x27;t be banned. As a tax paying law following resident, I definitely want my local police department to bring criminals to justice and deter crime. I&#x27;d like them to do so as effectively and efficiently as possible, which means giving them access to the best technology available. I am OK with some controls that limit use of facial recognition to only situations with either a warrant or some other condition like reasonable suspicion or probable cause. But an outright ban on this technology is ultimately no different than banning the use of electricity at police stations.