Spring and summer of 2026 have seen a sharp increase in the public’s awareness of pervasive police tech in the United States, primarily through the rising infamy of AI surveillance company Flock Safety. But as many Americans now revile automatic license plate readers, privacy advocates say we’ve only just scratched the surface of the web of police surveillance quickly enveloping the country.
As Flock cameras come down, either at the hands of an outraged community or an angry guy with a Sawzall, they’re being replaced with an even more perfidious system: Axon’s Fusus platform.
Like Flock’s FlockOS, Axon’s Fusus is designed to fuse many separate surveillance feeds into one unified dashboard for police to access. But unlike Flock’s system — which is already enabling privacy abuse at an unprecedented scale — Fusus works with all kinds of police gadgets, not just the company’s proprietary cameras.
As NPR notes, this includes data and footage from body cameras, squad car dashcams, 911 dispatch calls, audio-based gunshot detectors, police drones, and CCTV feeds.
George Washington University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson told the broadcaster that systems like Fusus are increasingly being deployed by local police departments throughout the country, where they form the digital backbone of control rooms known as “real-time crime centers.”
“I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement,” Ferguson said, “because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones and essentially a way to create a visual single-pane-of-glass vision of what’s going on in a city, with time machine capabilities where you can go back and investigate crime.”
It was one of these real-time crime centers that played a pivotal role in the false arrest of Qeyeon Tolbert, a Cleveland man who was charged with murder based on an AI-generated report that fused social media data, CCTV footage, and a rap album cover to declare a possible match (a supposedly pivotal search warrant was later voided by a judge, on the grounds that an AI report alone doesn’t count as probable cause.)
And when you ask police about systems like Fusus, their answers aren’t exactly reassuring — their focus is clearly on making their jobs easier, rather than protecting privacy and civil liberties.
“Instead of having to go to a million different systems, a million different places to find answers, we can get it in one platform in one place somewhat instantaneously,” Greenville County Sheriff’s Office lieutenant Quincy Whitner bragged to NPR.
As Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University told the radio station, ease of use is exactly the point.
“In addition to all of the things that you would want in place requiring some kind of criminal predicate to launch [an investigation], there is just this kind of organic friction that imposes some constraints,” Levinson-Waldman explained. “As that friction gets lifted, it becomes easier and easier to do investigations, to look at people and even to pull up broad-scale information.”
More on police surveillance: Americans Are Raging About Autonomous Police Drones Swarming the Skies
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