We Need to Take Tech Back From Police and Stop Super-Powering Cops
“As the country navigates the effects of COVID-19 and its implications on our economic, mental, and social well-being, Black people are also mourning for the victims of police violence. We are heartbroken, enraged, and exhausted. Our country’s callous and continuous assault on Black people through police brutality must end.”
Technology companies want you to believe that they are “neutral” parties when it comes to policing. This is false; in fact, tech companies have a privileged relationship with the police force in America, make significant amounts of money from police departments, and actively build, market and sell technologies to them -- including and especially their most cutting-edge products, like artificial intelligence, connected vehicles, facial recognition and surveillance networks. Many of these technologies, produced by white-dominated companies with generally white leadership, have racial basis already built in. This means that “black communities are already living in the future of a tech dystopia when it comes to policing, or when it comes to all kinds of algorithms that are making life and death decisions,” says Ruha Benjamin, author of Race After Technology.
In the middle of Black protest against police violence in the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, calls to abolish and defund the police have grown. As Justin Brooks lays out for The Appeal, emphasis added:
“We do not need more police. We do not need more surveillance and more police on patrol. We do not need better police technology and more community-police partnerships. We do not need more reactive responses to Black death, like charges that rarely lead to convictions.”
In the same vein of taking away the financial resources that support cops, we need to begin working to cut off the flow of technology from Silicon Valley and other tech centers into the white surpremicist police force. As long as our labor, our community, our open source software, our employers and our code is used by and sold to cops, we are complicit.
The United States spends over $100 billion a year on policing and $80 billion on incarceration. The law enforcement software market will be around 18.13 billion by 2023. Major tech companies, including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, capture from this ever-growing market with lucrative contracts. None of this is new; “Computer software and hardware firms such as Esri and IBM have been developing crime prediction programs since the 1990s” - Police, A Field Guide. However, the tech projects of the last few years have been unprecedented in scope and power.
One of the most alarming projects we know of is Microsoft’s creation of the “Domain Awareness System” with the NYPD; this system “utilizes the largest networks of cameras, license plate readers, and radiological sensors in the world” to super-charge NYPD’s racist police force. New York served as a testing ground for Microsoft and police forces all over the country -- with both the NYPD (which stands to make 30% of all future sales of the system) and Microsoft profiting from an *initial* cost of $230 million. IBM was also brought in as a subcontractor, netting them 60.7 million dollars. As Ángel Díaz points out, this system and other police technologies have been developed in secrecy from the public and City Council.
Other significant cop/tech collaborations include Amazon’s RING: Amazon works with over 400 police and fire departments to create a surveillance network out of consumer homes fitted with its the camera-equipped “smart doorbell”, and collects money from cops to provide the hardware at a discount to citizens -- up to $100,000 per municipality. Amazon’s GovCloud was developed specifically for government customers, and hosts untold number of police departments as customers, including the Indiana State Police Department, the Plano Texas cops, and many law enforcement departments in Minnesota. As another data point, Palantir is well-known for contracting with ICE (see the #NoTechforICE movement started by ConMijente) and its role in the raids, surveillance, deportation and detainment of families and children. But their products are also heavily used by police departments around the country, including the New Orleans Police Department, LAPD and the Northern California Regional Intelligence center.
Tech companies want you to think police are just another of their many users, but technology companies are in fact imagining, envisioning and manifesting a new image of tech-powered law enforcement and what a modern cop looks like. In sales material, Amazon’s conception of “data-driven policing” shows a police force constantly connected to the Amazon cloud and its many features and applications. The result is a new, technology-enabled “super cop” with body cams, GPS tracking, the AWS DeepLens camera, voice recognition technology, and an entire arsenal of tools to instantly compare, store and analyze surveillance data. In another case of tech “innovating” police, Microsoft developed the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, a cloud-connected SUV for cops that it describes as “the mobile precinct,” keeping cops constantly connected in real time to intelligence and surveillance systems.
It’s a myth that police just happen to adopt technology that tech companies are making anyways; the development, sales and marketing process that tech companies use to pitch their products to police is very much deliberant and hands-on, leveraging significant corporate resources. Earlier this year, tech companies were highly present at the European Police Congress: “Microsoft demonstrated its image recognition technology. Samsung displayed a range of handsets, including a specially designed Galaxy phone for police officers. IBM was pitching artificial intelligence. Oracle showed how its technology would help with immigration enforcement, with gang and drug investigations, and in prisons.” Amazon has been a multi-year guest to the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Technology Conference, sponsors branded content in cop publications and has even created cop-specific advertising.
Far from being confined to just large technology companies, tech has myriad smaller startups who focus exclusively or in large part on police as their customers. The controversial Clearview AI, which the ACLU has sued for enabling “covert and remote surveillance of Americans on a massive scale”, was funded by NY venture capital firm Kirenaga Partners. Lesser-known Mark43, which is funded by Jeff Bezos and other venture capitalists to the tune of $78 million and built on AWS GovCloud, provides more than 70 police agencies with data analytics, record management and dispatch. They have a $5 million contract with the San Antonio Police Department. Egregiously, there’s the case of YCombinator-funded Sanntek, a breath analyzer for marijuana. Founded by two white people, it will be used primarily against Black people as a tool to criminalize them, ever-worsening the racist politics of marijuana legalization across the country. In providing significant infusions of venture capital cash, the tech community is essentially subsidizing police tech and is serving as outsourced R&D for police agencies.
Importantly, many startups that create technology for use by cops are funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. Many of the startups that In-Q-Tel funds are never made public, and the amounts they receive aren’t made public, either. The exit path for these startups is also dystopian AF. TASER (now AXON) which provides deadly weaponry to police departments and has a market cap of 5.65 billion dollars, has bought several tech startups including AI-company Dextro (with funding from New York venture capitalists and Yale) and an acqui-hire from Misfit, a consumer wearables play. ShotSpotter, a publicly-traded gunshot detection system, purchased HunchLab, a predictive policing software, in 2018. The software is used by Chicago PD and others.
In the age of militarized policing, it’s also important to look at how tech companies are investing in military startups. Andreesen Horowitz, one of the biggest venture capital firms in the Valley, is a repeat offender in investing in racist, dystopian military tech: for example, Anduril, a military technology startup founded by alt-right terrorist Palmer Luckey, provides physical and virtual infrastructure actively in use at the US/Mexico border to track and detain human beings in contravention of human rights. Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor in the following companies with significant designs on the government infrastructure and significant potential applications in the surveillance infrastructure:
Toka Cyber Builders, a "cyber capacity-building company that empowers governments & agencies to challenge conventions of Homeland-Security by designing groundbreaking cyber-intelligence and operational capabilities."
Skydio, an enterprise drone company promising "breakthrough intelligence" and "the most advanced flying AI on the planet."
SkySafe, which "provides world-class drone defense and airspace control solutions" and is specifically targeting the military sector. SkySafe has a $1.5 million contract with the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, or DIUx . DIUx has documented meetings with high-level A16z partners going back to April 2015.
ShieldAI, "an artificial intelligence which enables robots to see, reason about, and search the world," founded by a former NAVY Seal and actively courting government clientele.
We also must investigate how tech companies in particular maintain an intimate relationship with police in the places where they set up offices and have a large employee presence. Tech companies hire cops, and increase policing in the areas where they have offices and where tech employees live and gentrify cities. In San Francisco, through the 10-B program, tech companies including Salesforce hire off-duty cops for $100/hour. Mark Zuckerberg’s security is comprised of corrupt ex-Oakland police officers, and he has brought more police presence into its corporate HQ in the Bay: as JT Faraji highlights, Facebook funds cop salaries and police units in the area, increasing racist profiling and arrests. Apple contracts out the Santa Clara Police Department to provide security for its company town, Cupertino. Several months after Ferguson, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff donated weaponized jetskis to SFPD. He has also given 1.5 million to their police academy. With headquarters in Seattle, Amazon has a lucrative contract with the Washington County Sheriff’s Department to provide facial recognition software; one of their cops even contributed this marketing post on they use Rekognition, calling it “a powerful tool for identifying suspects for my agency” and saying “I hope to make it the standard for facial recognition in law enforcement.” Speaking even more to this special relationship, the Seattle Police Department hired an Amazon executive to serve as its Chief Information Officer, with his new charter including using data to predict crimes.
This is only a brief overview of some of the ways that tech is complicit in racist policing. The ways in which the technology industry currently colludes with the white supremicist police force in America tells us about what we must do as tech workers -- especially white tech workers -- to divest from this system. It’s time for the technology industry to stop providing cops with technology that makes it easier for them to surveil, track down and incarcerate Black people, commit violence against Black people, escape accountability and continue their white supremicist agenda.
We need to stop developing products for the cops. We need to stop considering cops as “users” and their brutal actions “user stories.” We need to stop marketing and selling our tech to police. We need to start speaking up about, and boycotting tech contracts with police. It’s time to cut VC funding to policing, military and surveillance startups. We need to confront the way tech companies create and increase policing in their neighborhoods, and stop tech executives from becoming police executives, bringing everything they know about the industry with them.
It’s time for tech workers to divest from the policing infrastructure, #TakeTechBack, say #WeWontBuildIt and there will be #NoTechforCops.