Thread by @cfarivar

THREAD: The latest from yours truly:

Cute videos, but little evidence: Police say Amazon Ring isn't much of a crime fighter

nbcnews.com/news/all/cute-…

This piece began months ago when I started to see story after story about Ring and privacy by @dellcam, @josephfcox, among others.

I had a more basic question: does Ring actually stop crime? Does it deter crime, as the company claims?

@dellcam @josephfcox This is a major tenet of Ring, that it has the power to reduce property crime.

See the company’s boilerplate about one one LA "neighborhood saw a 55% decrease in home break-ins after Ring Video Doorbells were installed on just ten percent of homes.”

businesswire.com/news/home/2018…

@dellcam @josephfcox Here’s the founder and CEO of. Ring making this claim in 2018:

@dellcam @josephfcox Now, @meharris did a story that was incredibly instructive back in Oct 2018:

technologyreview.com/s/612307/video…

@dellcam @josephfcox @meharris What I didn’t fully appreciate until I wrote this story was how quickly Ring has grown—in terms of partnerships (MOUs)—with police, in 2019.

It went from 61 (Jan 1 2019) to 766 (Dec 31 2019).

Check this:

@dellcam @josephfcox @meharris These deals allow cops to get in on the Neighbors app, and request video from people in the community. Cops can’t unilaterally pull the footage.

@dellcam @josephfcox @meharris Sometimes people are sending in videos anyway, of obvious non-criminal behavior.

Here’s Stuart, FL:

ring.com/share/20947588…

documentcloud.org/documents/6774…

So, Ring cameras are expanding. Cops are doing hella deals with Ring.

Deterrence effect is dubious, and hard to measure. (It’s obviously hard to prove that a crime didn’t happen because of a given thing.)

So what about arrests tho? Are cops catching bad guys via Ring?

By and large, no. How do I know?

I asked, starting with the agencies that have had the longest-running MOUs with Ring.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

And thanks to Florida public records law, and some *very* patient cops (THANK YOU!), I learned that the number of actual arrests attributed to Ring cameras is quite small.

Ft. Lauderdale, FL has been with Ring for nearly 2 years.

How many people have they gotten via Ring? 4

But Ring obviously sees its MOUs with cops as a benefit, as @ProfFerguson told me. (This got edited out, sorry!)

“If you’re the platform for interacting with your law enforcement, you gain a lot of power,” he said.

@ProfFerguson So: at the end of the day, neither a small town that agreed to do a promo video for Ring (Winter Park, FL) nor a major city (Houston, TX) is known to have arrested a single person via Ring.

@ProfFerguson “Our limiting factor is not evidence,” Lt. Jack Harvey, a lead property crime investigator at the Houston Police Department said.

“We have more solvable evidence than we have investigators.”

@ProfFerguson Also, as I was researching this story, I saw in city after city that in most instances, property crime is down by half over the last decade.

@ProfFerguson The FBI has a really easy-to-use tool to get at this info (Serious!) :

Here’s Houston:

crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/agenc…

@ProfFerguson And finally, just two days ago, this piece came out from @max_read:

nymag.com/intelligencer/…

This line is going to sit with me for awhile:

@ProfFerguson @max_read If you’ve read the piece and/or read to the end of the thread, THANK YOU AND HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND.

And say hi to your real-life neighbors, in person? Cool? Cool.

-30-

@ProfFerguson @max_read Last thing: here’s the press release template that Ring told the Stuart, FL PD are “for internal use only and not to be shared with the media.” (documentcloud.org/documents/6669…)

Here’s that doc, which I obtained via a public records request. (THANK YOU FLORIDA!)

documentcloud.org/documents/6669…