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February 16, 2020 08:34 am

Police Say Amazon's Ring Isn't Much of a Crime Fighter

Ring's promotional video includes the police chief of the small Florida suburb of Winter Park saying "we understand the value of those cameras in helping us solve crimes." But over the last 22 months, their partnership with Ring hasn't actually led to a single arrest, reports NBC News. The only crime it solved was a 13-year-old boy who opened two delivered packages, decided he didn't like what was inside, and rode away on his bike. "Eventually the boy was sent to a state diversion program for first-time offenders in lieu of being formally charged in court." Ring promises to "make neighborhoods safer" by deterring and helping to solve crimes, citing its own research that says an installation of its doorbell cameras reduces burglaries by more than 50 percent. But an NBC News Investigation has found -- after interviews with 40 law enforcement agencies in eight states that have partnered with Ring for at least three months -- that there is little concrete evidence to support the claim. Three agencies said the ease with which the public can share Ring videos means officers spend time reviewing clips of non-criminal issues such as racoons and petty disagreements between neighbors. Others noted that the flood of footage generated by Ring cameras rarely led to positive identifications of suspects, let alone arrests. Thirteen of the 40 jurisdictions reached, including Winter Park, said they had made zero arrests as a result of Ring footage. Thirteen were able to confirm arrests made after reviewing Ring footage, while two offered estimates. The rest, including large cities like Phoenix, Miami, and Kansas City, Missouri, said that they don't know how many arrests had been made as a result of their relationship with Ring -- and therefore could not evaluate its effectiveness -- even though they had been working with the company for well over a year... None of the departments said they collect data to measure the impact of their Ring partnership in terms of reducing or deterring crimes, nor did they consistently record when Ring footage was helpful in identifying or arresting a suspect... "There's a deafening lack of evidence that any city has been made safer," Liz O'Sullivan, the technology director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that fights excessive local and state-level surveillance, told NBC News. The lack of evidence that Ring reduces crime adds to a list of concerns that have plagued the company in recent months, ranging from bad security practices to privacy questions surrounding the company's plans to incorporate facial recognition, among other biometric characteristics. NBC News also spoke to Ben Stickle, a professor of criminal justice at Middle Tennessee State University (and a former police officer) who published an academic study analyzing the effectiveness of Ring cameras as a deterrent. "If you expect the camera to deter people, you're assuming that they see it and that they care. Those are two big assumptions." Ring's claim that its doorbell cameras reduce crime seem to be based on a 2015 report by a police captain in Los Angeles' wealthy Wilshire Park neighborhood of a 55% drop in burglaries after Ring cameras were installed on 10% of the doors. But in an overlooked follow-up, MIT's Technology Review reported that in 2017, Wilshire Park "suffered more burglaries than in any of the previous seven years."

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