WPD joins hundreds of police forces partnering with doorbell-camera company Ring
The Wichita Police Department has joined a growing number of law enforcement agencies nationwide partnering with Amazon-owned doorbell camera company Ring in an effort to make neighborhoods safer.
Lt. Patrick Leon said Thursday that the department’s involvement with Ring began in February. But starting in September, Ring , based on information it receives from its customers, will able to send alerts to the police department’s community policing officers notifying them of crimes in Wichita neighborhoods.
The officers will then be able to ask Ring to contact subscribers to the company’s video-recording service to request copies of any footage that doorbell cameras may have captured of an event.
Residents can choose to either provide the video or refuse, Leon said. And they can deny video requests individually or ask for a blanket denial would cover future contact from the police department through Ring.
“It’s totally voluntary if people want to share their video,” Leon said.
The partnership does not give Wichita police access to a subscriber’s Ring camera doorbell in real time nor does it let officers view any videos a subscriber might have stored on their Ring account.
Ring also does not provide police with a list of their subscribers, and officers can’t see who exactly has a doorbell, Leon said.
“We can’t review their videos,” Leon said. “We don’t have their address. We don’t have any of their information. All it comes to us as a subscriber.”
The department is hoping the collaboration “will help us solve crimes and keep people safe,” he said.
The partnership comes as police forces around the country are looking for new ways to help fight crime using technology. So far, more than 400 police forces in the U.S. have video-sharing partnerships with Ring, the Washington Post reported this week. Kansas agencies already on board include police departments in Olathe, Overland Park, Shawnee and Lenexa, a Ring spokeswoman told The Eagle earlier this year.
The Wichita Police Department started considering a possible partnership with Ring this past winter. But Leon said Wichita officials wanted to explore whether a collaboration would be a good fit for the city and train officers on how it the alert systems works before telling the public about it.
In the months since talks began, the police department has received doorbell camera footage that it’s used in investigations. But generally that’s been provided by residents who initiated contact with police — and not the other way around, Leon said.
The new alert system makes more police-initiated requests possible. And easier.
“In this digital age of video, it’s been very helpful to our department in regards to citizens reporting suspicious activity in regards to burglaries or larcenies,” Leon said. “They (citizens) share the video and the video is then shared with all of the officers on the department” including detectives and Crime Stoppers, who investigate.
“It’s a very valuable tool that ... really aids in the identification and apprehension of suspects,” Leon said.
Ring doorbell cameras, which sell on Amazon for $99.99 to $249.99, let residents keep tabs on what’s happening outside of their homes. The doorbells connect to a home’s wifi network and turn on when they detect motion or when someone rings the doorbell, according to Ring’s website.
Using the Ring Smartphone app, residents can see a video stream of whoever or whatever is at their door in real time. The resident can use the app to speak to whoever is at their door using two-way audio communication, similar to how an intercom works.
For an additional monthly fee of $3 or $10, the doorbells will record and store video footage so the resident can view it later. Video from that subscription service is what police can ask to see.
Ring also has a separate, free Smartphone app called Neighbors that allows people to share surveillance video publicly and post messages about what’s going on in their neighborhoods. You do not have to be a Ring doorbell user or subscriber to join or post.
Leon said Thursday that Ring has donated some of its camera-doorbells to the police department that will be handed out for free to residents living in neighborhoods with high burglary rates. Those who want the video-recording service will have to pay for it themselves, he said. That cost will not be covered or subsidized by the police department or city.
The police department plans to determine exactly which neighborhoods will be offered the free doorbells in the coming months, Leon said.
Amazon purchased Ring last year in a deal reportedly worth more than $1 billion to grow its home security business and give customers a way to protect their Amazon deliveries from thieves. But as Ring’s popularity grows with homeowners seeking to protect themselves and their property, the company’s ongoing partnerships with law enforcement agencies have drawn criticism from those who say the alliances operate with little oversight or transparency and pose a threat to residents’ privacy rights.
Evan Greer, deputy director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, in a recent Kansas City Star interview, said the police partnerships are letting Amazon build “a for-profit surveillance dragnet” that circumvents the country’s democratic process and could “undermine our basic rights and freedoms” more than they will make people safe.
A Ring spokesperson in a statement told The Star that the company does not support programs that require recipients to subscribe to a recording plan or share footage as a condition of receiving a donated doorbell and that “privacy and security and control are extremely important to us.”
The growing use of the devices by police also raises questions about citizens’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, Lauren Bonds, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said in a recent Star interview.
“Even though it’s an opt-in process for individual residents, it’s not an opt-in process for people who are essentially subject to a constant police surveillance state,” Bonds said. “When the government is employing all these cameras that can cover someone’s moves across an entire neighborhood, that’s a surveillance state.”
For example, sometimes Ring users give police surveillance footage of people who they think look or are acting suspicious but who aren’t doing anything wrong.
That was the case in a recent Wichita incident where a citizen turned over video of someone they considered suspicious but who actually went to the address looking for people who used to live there. “But because of the video we were able to identify who that person was,” said Leon, the Wichita police lieutenant.
A recent Motherboard analysis found that the majority of people reported as “suspicious” on the Neighbors app were people of color.
“I think it’s going to continue to reinforce a very problematic concept we have that certain people belong places and certain people don’t,” Bonds said. “That’s going to have incredible racial impacts and it’s deeply concerning.”
There also are concerns that police might obtain a doorbell camera video directly from Ring without permission from the user who owns it.
But Wichita police officer Charley Davidson said the police department would have to have probable cause — a good reason to think that the video has evidence of a crime — and a search warrant to do so.
“This is no different than any other camera that we’ve had” to obtain footage from, he said.
This story was originally published August 29, 2019 at 1:31 PM.
