Ring Breaks Up With Law Enforcement, Will No Longer Provide A Footage Request Portal For Cops

Hey, everyone makes mistakes. Ring certainly did. Amazon’s home surveillance acquisition realized there was no one in the residential space willing to slavishly cater to cops.

Ring decided it would provide this supposed “public service.” It gave cops cheap/free cameras and urged them to hand them out to as many private citizens as possible. The intent was this: if regular people got free cameras from cops, they’d be less likely deny requests for recordings with or without a warrant.

Without a warrant was status quo. And when users resisted law enforcement advances, cops went to Ring directly with requests for footage stored in the cloud.

Things were working out well for Ring and their cop buddies. On top of portals created for law enforcement access, there was Ring’s neighborhood app. It may have seemed like a good idea to create an ultra-local portal for crime reports. But the reality was a nightmare: an app with a top-level brand name attached that served as portal for residents’ racism.

But Ring persisted. It seemed to believe the best path forward ran through the nation’s cop shops. Ring handed out free cameras and asked for nothing more in return than complete abdication by its law enforcement partners. Cops handed out cameras, but Ring handled public statements, responses to media inquiries, and specifically told law enforcement agencies this “partnership” was predicated entirely on Ring doing what was best for Ring.

There are tensions. On one hand, there’s the understandable willingness to give the paranoiacs what they want. People who think every brown-ish person is a latent threat to public safety should be given a voice on a platform that makes the most money when everyone — including cops patrolling the area — believes it’s inundated with latent threats. On the other hand, there’s the reality: crime rates have been dropping steadily for the last three decades. But if you acknowledge that fact, you can hardly justify your existence, much less your stranglehold on the market.

Ring cultivated close relationships with law enforcement agencies. It seemed like the easiest way to expand the reach of its market. But now, things are far less easily defined. Cops refuse to learn from their mistakes, which means their private partners in surveillance are implicated every time law enforcement officers fuck up on main.

The first expansion worked out well because cops were receptive. But examinations of the details of these partnerships exposed how willing Ring was to undercut common constitutional protections to keep cops happy.

Ring has finally realized its potential market included millions of non-cop Americans. If Ring wants to continue to make in-roads, it needs to shrug off its cops-first approach to retail. People do want to protect their own property, which means millions of people are interested in home surveillance cameras. What regular people aren’t as willing to do is be forced to share their recordings with cops just because (1) Ring stores recordings in its cloud, or (2) because Ring makes it easy for cops to avoid asking for consent by cutting end users out of the equation.

Ring did dial back law enforcement access after months of negative press. But its latest announcement makes everything official: if cops want access to footage, they’ll need to respect the Constitution, rather than just assume the Third Party Doctrine makes this formative text irrelevant. Here’s Matthew Guariglia, report for the EFF:

Amazon’s Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police’s warrantless requests for footage from Ring users. This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket police surveillance, but also against a culture in which private, for-profit companies build special tools to allow law enforcement to more easily access companies’ users and their data—all of which ultimately undermine their customers’ trust.

This is the next step in Ring’s slow withdrawal from its original position of ultimate law enforcement subservience. Having discovered that lying down with law dogs gets you covered in PR fleas, Ring is now seeking to salvage what’s left of its reputation.

And that’s a definite public good. Here’s how Ring explains it on its own site:

This week, we are also sunsetting the Request for Assistance (RFA) tool. Public safety agencies like fire and police departments can still use the Neighbors app to share helpful safety tips, updates, and community events. They will no longer be able to use the RFA tool to request and receive video in the app. Public safety agency posts are still public, and will be available for users to view on the Neighbors app feed and on the agency’s profile.

This is what will matter going forward. Ring has changed its access for law enforcement. But it has kept lines open for “first responders.” Cops who have maintained good relationships with the neighborhoods they serve will be largely unaffected. They may lose always-on access, but they should be able to leverage their connections to obtain footage.

Most law enforcement agencies won’t have that luxury. They’re unwilling to build relationships with communities, which means Ring’s announcement will greatly restrict access to footage without a warrant. At any point, these agencies could have changed the calculus. But most agencies prefer to act as though they’re above working with community leaders or those living in the areas they patrol. So, this will hurt them, because they’ll no longer have the option to demand access to footage without creating a courtroom paper trail.

The change is so essential even a cop-friendly tech company like Ring can’t ignore it. Moving forward as a company millions of Americans can trust means publicly indicating law enforcement isn’t inherently trustworthy. Taking cops out of the loop will make it easier for Ring to sell cameras to the millions of Americans who believe their own property is worth protecting, but don’t necessarily believe law enforcement officers are of much use when it comes to protecting personal property.

No doubt this will result in more than a few law enforcement officials claiming the loss of easy access will lead to crime waves they’re apparently unable to anticipate, much less curtail. But they’ll have to face the uncomfortable fact that Ring’s decision to block access to recordings has been prompted by their own actions — actions that have made it clear to Ring it’s ultimately more profitable to gain the public’s trust, rather than bed down with any cop shop that will have it.