Last week’s election was a message from the American people. It was a bipartisan repudiation of Trump’s presidency and the technology oligarchy, data centers, and AI. Replacing Cleveland’s Flock cameras with Axon cameras embraces all of those things that Ohio voters made it clear we are against.
Did you know that Trump recently invested 5 million dollars in Axon right before awarding them a multi-million dollar contract with ICE? Axon is deeply embedded in the federal government. They say they don’t have a national search function, but that doesn’t stop the Trump administration from bypassing those protections with executive orders or subpoenas, including National Security Letters with gag orders that Axon would be forbidden from informing the city about.
Furthermore, Axon is actively embroiled in a federal lawsuit alleging that it unlawfully collected, used, and shared the personal information of millions of drivers in California through its ALPR network. This lawsuit calls into question Axon's willingness to comply with state and local laws and safeguards. Their primary concern is their own growth and profit, not making sure their technology respects people's legally endowed rights.
Axon’s history of corruption cannot be ignored. They have promoted the pseudoscientific and racialized diagnosis of “excited delirium” for people killed in police custody, and have made a practice of suing any medical examiner who attributes cause of death to their tasers.
They have invested heavily in facial recognition technology, which is proven to be racially biased and gender biased. Black and Asian people are up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified, leading to wrongful arrest.
They have acquired or partnered with multiple drone makers - including Skydio, another contract that will be introduced tonight - and have proposed arming these drones with taser technology. Axon’s own AI ethics board rejected this proposal as too dangerous. But Axon didn’t like being told “no,” so they went ahead and dissolved the whole ethics committee.
Axon has such a monopoly on police surveillance that they’ve been sued for anti-trust violations multiple times. They own the 911 technology, the real time crime center, police body camera footage, error-prone AI tools that transcribe police reports, and so much more. Allowing a single corporation to control technology that impacts the community’s safety, liberty, and privacy raises significant democracy concerns.
License plate readers on our streets that catalog the movements and patterns of life of the vast majority of people who aren’t suspected of wrongdoing is a violation of our civil liberties by any vendor, and this fight doesn’t end with Flock. It ends when the city stands up for its people against mass surveillance.
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