NYPD Joins Amazon’s Ring Neighbors Surveillance App

The NYPD announced(Opens in a new window) Wednesday it will participate in Ring Neighbors, an app that facilitates interaction between law enforcement and the public.

According to the NYPD, the collaboration between the Amazon-owned Ring and the US’s largest police force will commence in the coming week.

Through the app, the NYPD will be able to post notifications to the public, and seek their help with active police matters through a “Request for Assistance” feature. The police force will not, however, be monitoring the app around the clock.

Neighbors is a neighborhood watch feature that alerts app users to crime events in a radius up to 5 miles around their home. The app allows residents to relay neighborhood safety concerns as well as post footage from their cameras.

“The ability to interact online with New Yorkers – often in real time – adds to the comprehensive crime-fighting strategies already employed by the NYPD in its relentless efforts to keep our city and everyone in it safe,” says Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell. “True public safety is a shared responsibility, and this tool stands to further advance the collective work of our police and all the people we serve toward reaching that worthy ideal.”

The Amazon surveillance app has been hugely popular with police forces in recent years. According to The Verge, more than 2,000(Opens in a new window) US police and fire departments had partnered with Ring as of 2021, up from several hundred in 2019.

The planned collaboration has not come without backlash. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), a privacy and civil rights group, condemned the NYPD’s venture. In a public statement(Opens in a new window) the group said: “The NYPD has never been a good neighbor to most New Yorkers, and this move will only put more people at risk.”

“This technology isn’t keeping people safe, it’s getting neighbors shot, as we tragically saw last week in Florida. This sort of crowdsourced surveillance will only lead to more wrongful arrests, racial profiling, and police violence. Most New Yorkers would second guess installing these home surveillance tools if they understood how easily these systems could be used against them and their families by police.”

Last month, a man and his teenage son in Florida allegedly shot a woman(Opens in a new window) in her car seven times after receiving a Ring alert and mistaking her for a burglar.