Hundreds of police departments have signed agreements with Ring to gain access to footage filmed on home surveillance cameras
Last year, Ring, the doorbell and security camera company — which Amazon bought in 2018 — released a promotional video, centered on the town of Winter Park, Florida.
Since 2018, Ring has signed up more than 800 law enforcement agencies as “partners,” offering them access to video footage recorded by its millions of customers’ internet-connected cameras across the U.S. through an app called Neighbors. Ring’s rise also comes at a time when reports of property crimes, including package theft and burglaries, are already in steep decline across the United States.
Amazon declined to share any data on how Ring has impacted Amazon package theft, if at all, but tells customers to use an Amazon locker, or have their packages delivered elsewhere as a possible way to mitigate theft. 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.
Ring does not disclose how many users it has, but has repeatedly stated — as recently as in a January 2020 letter to five senators — that there are “millions” of customers who have purchased a Ring device. In press releases, Ring claims that “one Los Angeles neighborhood saw a 55 percent decrease in home break-ins after Ring doorbells were installed on just ten percent of homes.” This pilot, which took place over a seven-month period in 2015 has become a keystone of Ring’s origin story.
In a statement provided to NBC News, the Newark Police Department repeated the assertions made on the Ring website, without any further explanation of the methodology or analysis. A Newark police spokeswoman, Catherine Adams, clarified that the agency “didn’t capture any information regarding a control group or how many doorbell cameras were installed.
For instance, Green Bay, the third-largest city in Wisconsin, hasn’t made any arrests via Ring since signing its agreement in August 2018, said Commander Paul Ebel, of the city’s investigations division. Similarly, Mesquite, Texas, has also made just one arrest since signing in September 2018 — for stealing an Amazon-delivered package containing an Echo Show smart speaker, and also the mounted Ring camera itself, spokesman Lt. Stephen Biggs, emailed NBC.
“The way I would describe it, is that it’s an incremental change,” Lt. Jack Harvey, a lead property crime investigator at the Houston Police Department, the nation’s fifth-largest city police agency, said. “It’s not a paradigm shift.” Ring makes it so frictionless to share footage with police that some residents submit videos of anything they find displeasing, even when there is no indication that a crime has been committed, Lt. Santos, of Winter Park, said.
Others told NBC News that they believe that Ring leads to lower crime rates even in the absence of definitive proof. The volume of parcels sent in the U.S. has been rising over the last decade at a rate of about 7-9 percent each year, corresponding with the rise in online shopping, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index.
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