In mid-2023, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office was looking to improve its drone surveillance operations. Among those vying to help were typical law enforcement providers, and one other: Amazon Web Services.
The company pitched a prototype of an AI tool capable of detecting weapons or any object of interest in live surveillance photos and video, sending text alerts to cops with their location.
San Diego County took a demo but passed. Similarly, after testing out the live streaming software powering Amazon’s Twitch gaming platform to stream its real-time drone footage, the agency went with a different provider, Nomad Media. But the world’s biggest everything store will still collect a check on that deal. Nomad is closely partnered with Amazon Web Services. It runs its software on AWS cloud and its object detection, should San Diego or other customers choose to use it, is powered by Rekognition, Amazon’s AI image and video analysis service. Nomad CEO Adam Miller told Forbes his company often goes to market with Amazon. “We use a tremendous number of their AWS services,” Miller said.
It’s a model that’s working well for Amazon and its partners as they seek to grab a slice of the $11 billion police tech market. Emails with police agencies up and down the West Coast show Amazon’s law enforcement and school safety team, led by a former police officer from Washington state, is aggressively courting new customers. At closed door conferences and parties with local and federal law enforcement, it’s been promoting its own surveillance offerings and an expanding array of partner tools that run on its vast cloud infrastructure, among them:
The emails, obtained via public records requests, suggest Amazon has been aggressively marketing surveillance tech to cops. In one message, Amazon’s law enforcement and school safety lead gives the San Diego County Sheriff’s office the hard sell on Lucidus writing, “It is one of the most amazing tools that I have seen for law enforcement and has so many applications that I don’t want to skew where your mind will go with it … I think your jail intel group would lose their minds.” At the time, Lucidus was marketing a “person database” containing more than 120 billion records, which cops could use to search for social security numbers, addresses, emails and more.
In a November 2023 message to chiefs of police in King County, Washington, the same Amazon director pitched a meeting to “talk strategy around how to get ZeroEyes into your schools.” In another, he urged the departments to “get some countywide momentum going” to put Flock’s license plate readers on the roads. When he heard King County Sheriff’s Office was looking for AI solutions in 2024, he sent another message. “I want to get in front of whomever is running those projects to share the work that we are already doing with other agencies so this does not become a science project,” he wrote.
"I didn't realize Amazon was serving as a midwife for AI law enforcement technologies."
Amazon Web Services spokesperson Aisha Johnson said the emails obtained by Forbes were just business as usual, noting the company is intent on providing public sector customers “with tools to protect the rights of citizens and comply with applicable laws.”
But privacy activists have long worried about Amazon’s work with law enforcement. The company’s facial recognition tools have been criticised for being bad at differentiating non-white faces; earlier this year, it was lambasted for partnering with police tech giant Axon for a service allowing police to livestream footage from Ring cameras; having put a moratorium on sales of its Rekognition to cops in 2020, concerns were raised by privacy activists when it started selling it to the Justice Department last year. “It's dismaying to see one of the largest and most powerful companies pushing authoritarian surveillance tech in this way,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, told Forbes. “I didn't realize Amazon was serving as a midwife for AI law enforcement technologies.” Amazon has previously disputed such characterizations saying it recommends police only act on Rekognition face matches with a 95% or above confidence score and that Ring’s Axon partnership would “foster a vital connection between our neighbors and public safety agencies in their communities, giving them a way to work together to keep their neighborhoods safe.”
Police IT chiefs and partners seem more than happy for Amazon to play exactly that role. Ashish Kakkad, chief information officer at San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, told Forbes his agency saw the company as an easy conduit to new tech it wouldn’t have otherwise known about, one that added a “level of credibility.”
Abel Police cofounder and CEO Daniel Francis took a similar position. “The AWS team is wonderful,” he said, "They've made multiple introductions to agencies,” adding that their partnership had driven interest in Abel’s tool which automatically generates police reports by analyzing bodycam footage. A Y Combinator alum with $5 million in seed funding, Abel’s app can also read IDs like drivers licenses and gather contextual information about them from police databases. Thanks to an intro last year from Amazon’s law enforcement lead, Francis told Forbes, the company’s about to run a pilot with San Diego County.
Veritone CEO Ryan Steelberg and Nomad’s Miller said Amazon had been helpful getting their companies in front of police customers beyond the U.S., with recent introductions to U.K. agencies. “Over the last couple of years, it's been a more collaborative effort for AWS, really pushing hard to try to gain market share in the public sector space,” Steelberg said. “They've been a great partner, helping us get in front of new customers and with other agencies internationally.”
Beyond drones, AWS has been venturing into the increasingly-lucrative real-time crime center (RTCC) business, providing services to support the collection and AI analysis of law enforcement surveillance data. Last year, it hosted a Justice and Public Safety Innovation Day in its Irvine, California offices where it ran an RTCC “tour” to pitch cops on its offerings.
As Forbes reported last week, AWS was involved in helping partner company C3 AI stand up a sprawling RTCC initiative dubbed Project Sherlock, with California’s San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office and at least 15 other agencies. Designed to centralize and analyze surveillance feeds from departments across the area, it generated over $11 million in revenue for the partners, though it’s been hampered by delays.
That contract was largely funded by government grants, something which Amazon’s law enforcement lead offered to help with. In emails to Riverside County Sheriff’s Office in California, soon after an Amazon colleague had pitched Leo Technologies’ prison comms surveillance product at the agency, he offered to do some of the cops’ work for them, getting all the details on California’s $242 million Organized Retail Theft Prevention Grant Program. “That will show all the money that you all are eligible for,” he wrote.“I want to help you get all of it for this modernization stuff.” Amazon spokesperson Johnson said it was not uncommon to “educate” customers on grants available to them.
In mid-October, AWS is set to attend the premier American policing event of the year, the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Denver, where AI is top of the agenda. In previous years, it has hosted parties with drinks, food and live music to schmooze current and potential cop clients. For 2025, it’s taking a more chill approach to its marketing push: it’s sponsoring the event’s Wellness Lounge. There police officers can rest and relax before heading back out onto the show floor to check out the cornucopia of spy tech on offer, plenty of it running on Amazon servers.