Surveillance is Driving a Corporatization of Police Departments

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In early 2025, two of the biggest police-surveillance tech companies, Axon and Flock, went to war with each other, ending their cooperative relationship in a nasty public breakup complete with dueling accusatory CEO letters. This falling out may have been inevitable, as both companies are expanding their law enforcement offerings. Both sell license plate readers, surveillance cameras, drones, 911 services, and “real time crime centers.” Both are aggressively seeking to leverage the new capabilities of AI.

Ultimately, both have the ambition of becoming the leading provider of an “operating system for police departments.”

The companies are not very specific about what they mean by the “operating system” concept. With a computer or phone, an operating system is of course the software (such as Windows, Linux, iOS, or Android), that everything else runs on top of. Not only does it typically have visibility into what every app is doing, but also control; the entire system can’t even function without the OS.

But overall, the vision seems to be collecting, managing, controlling, analyzing, and optimizing the flow of data from disparate sources within police departments and allowing the exploitation of synergies from those sources. That would, without conscious efforts to the contrary, give these companies significant access to law enforcement data, including sensitive data about millions of Americans.

What could possibly go wrong with such an arrangement?

Today we’ve published a white paper looking at just how many things could go wrong if this is allowed to continue and with what is already happening. In 14 pages of snappy prose I and my colleague and co-author Lauren Yu describe the long history of police-corporate entanglement, what’s different about what’s happening today, and how it has come about. We talk about what could go wrong, and outline some ways that policymakers could head off such problems.

Americans, policymakers, and the policing profession itself need to grapple with the implications of this shift toward the corporatization of policing. What would it mean to have private companies playing a central, operating system-like role at the heart of a police department? What are the implications of having police data flowing through the hands of a for-profit private company that isn’t subject to the checks and balances that apply to government agencies? Those are questions we seek to raise and start to answer.