Cops Are Giving Amazon's Ring Real-Time 911 Data | Hacker News Reader

Cops Are Giving Amazon's Ring Real-Time 911 Data

gizmodo.com

32 pointsdanso10 comments

The title is kind of clickbait.

Amazon is requesting live crime data so they can push it to an app they made that ties into your ring doorbell and alerts you to crime.

It's related to an option you have to share video from your doorbell back to the cops if it caught any activity on camera.

> It's related to an option you have to share video from your doorbell back to the cops if it caught any activity on camera.

Very cool feature IMO.

On at least three occasions I've given video footage to the police. Just this week a cop rang my (Nest) doorbell and said one of my neighbors reported that someone had ransacked his car overnight.

I looked through footage and was able to find a car driving up the street checking everyone's door handles and searching the one's that were open. I was very happy to share it with police and as long as the choice remains with me about how and when to do so I will be very happy to provide them with footage in the future.

This data isn't yet commonly disseminated by police departments. At least, not in the way restaurant inspection data is standardized and made available thanks to Yelp's LIVES [0]. In the case of Yelp/inspection data, cities generally have a public API or URL, accessible to both Yelp and anyone else.

[0] https://www.yelp.com/healthscores

Seattle, Hood River County and many other places have had public dispach and incident trackers available for at least a decade.

You can listen to radio traffic with an SDR or XTS5000 and shortly thereafter a pin will appear on a map marking the incident location, typr of incident, police report and other data.

Why shouldn’t police be providing a real-time feed of 911 data? It’s in the public interest, and arguably the data belongs to the public. The only issue is why not everyone has access to this data feed.

What makes distress calls public data?

Acceptance and processing by a government system.

If dispatch systems don't provide the data, you can always pull it from radio over the air. More troublesome in my opinion.

> you can always pull it from radio over the air

and with Project 25 radio systems being implemented, that is becoming much more difficult.

> “Our in-house news team monitors every alert that comes through our system and determines if they are relevant crime & safety incidents to send out to impacted neighborhoods,” Ring says in one a document provided exclusively to law enforcement officials.

Of all things, doesn't this sound like something that would be pretty easy to automate? The data points sound straightforward (crime type, time, location, investigation status, etc).

Yes, theoretically it should be easy. Though I'm guessing every jurisdiction has a different way of categorizing things, and having human editors have the final OK will prevent situations where, say, a domestic dispute incident is pushed because it was misclassified by the police/emergency services.

Though the list [0] of CAD categories that Amazon Ring says it will publish, versus what they won't, makes absolutely no sense. For example, "Categories we cover" includes "Shootings" and "Stabbing". But "Categories we don't cover" include "Assault".

[0] https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--b8xmxPE...

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