Council Member Joe Jones wants to bring more security cameras to the fight against crime in Cleveland.
“It is our belief that if we are able to put more these in our neighborhood and in our community, it will help,” he said. “That is better than block watch, because those cameras will go off and catch everything.”
Jones was referring to door bell cameras like the Amazon Ring. He recently persuaded Cuyahoga County Council to allocate $150,000 from federal funds to the Ward 1 Ring Door Bell program. That money, plus another $150,000 from his own budget, will be used to purchase and give away Ring cameras to ward residents. Famicos Foundation will manage the initiative, which will begin in September.
The project could bring more cameras into the SAFE SMART CLE program, which encourages residents and business owners to share video from their security cameras with Cleveland police.
Since 2023, more than 1,500 home cameras have been registered and almost 3,700 on businesses have been integrated through SAFE SMART CLE. “Registered” means only that police know where cameras are and can ask homeowners for video if a crime occurred close by. “Integrated” means that police can remotely access the camera from their Real Time Crime Center, a small room downtown where public safety officials can view live images from the city’s own cameras.
The Real Time Crime Center views all of these cameras through a software platform called Fusus (pronounced “fuse us”). Fusus is owned by Axon, an Arizona-based company formerly known as TASER International. Axon still sells tasers, as well as cameras and software for law enforcement and private security use. The company markets Fusus as a multi-faceted resource for addressing some of the biggest challenges that police face: “Law enforcement response becomes easier, investigations take less time, and actionable evidence is readily available.”
Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration went a step further when it launched SAFE SMART CLE in 2023, saying that using technology for public safety “increases efficiency, decreases costs, and, most importantly, saves lives.”
But there is little independent research to back that up.
Brian Ray, a privacy expert and professor at Cleveland State University’s College of Law, worries that programs like this “normalize a culture of intrusive surveillance.”
“If we’re going to go down this road, then the burden should be on the police to demonstrate that the benefit is there,” said Ray. “And if it’s not, then you turn it off. It can’t just be, well, because we might need it. You need to demonstrate, and ideally you demonstrate that before you go down the path.”
A ‘permission-based’ system
Akron also gives away Ring cameras. The terms and conditions require the residents accepting a camera to notify police if it captures “suspected or actual criminal activity” and to make video available to police upon request. Jones said that won’t necessarily be the case in Ward 1.
“We have not worked out all the particulars of that, but the way we would want it is on a voluntary basis,” he said.
Signal Cleveland asked the city for examples of how integration has worked in the city, but a police department spokesperson declined because “disclosing specific details could risk revealing the location of victims or witnesses.”
In 2023, a Fusus representative joined a police official in Orland Park, Illinois, for a detailed public presentation to promote participation in that community’s version of camera integration. The presentation included examples of the technology.
The Fusus rep shared a video that he said was from a Georgia apartment complex with integrated cameras. The video showed three men sprinting across a parking lot, piling into a car and speeding off. That’s about as much info as an eyewitness from the same vantage point could probably provide, he said. But then he replayed the video and stopped it several times to point out details about the men’s clothing, that one appeared to be holding a gun, and that they all jumped into the passenger side of the car, suggesting someone else was driving.
All of that information was relayed to the responding officers, who also had access to the video on their dashboard computers.
The Fusus rep also described an incident from Orland Park. A man brandished a gun at a mall then fled on foot. Pursuing officers lost sight of him, but he was picked up on an integrated camera outside a nearby church. That’s how officers in the town’s real-time crime center saw him drop the gun in a dumpster and run into a wooded area. The man was quickly apprehended and the gun was recovered. Both would have taken longer, if they happened at all, without that camera, he said.
The Fusus rep and police official also emphasized that integration is “permission-based.” A small device that attaches to the camera owner’s network allows it to communicate with Fusus, and the camera owner controls all the device’s settings, including over remote access. If they allow that, police will tune in only when a crime or emergency has been reported at that site or nearby.
At least that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Security cameras and “surveillance creep”
In February, the technology news web site Gizmodo reported that, in 2024, Toledo police had used integrated cameras to watch public housing facilities for hours on end, even when no crimes had been reported.
“Officers spent 18,751 hours streaming live camera feeds from 275 cameras at 12 apartment complexes owned by the Lucas Metropolitan Housing Authority (LMHA) and several private landlords,” the article stated. “That was twice as much time as they spent watching the other 439 Fusus-enabled cameras spread throughout Toledo combined.”
Cleveland police do not have real-time access to cameras at Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority facilities, according to CMHA Chief of Staff Jeffrey Wade. He said it could happen in the future.
“This is something we are continuing to assess,” Wade told Signal Cleveland. “We’re always open to considering any of these initiatives that will help improve public safety.”
Gizmodo based its report on records it obtained from Toledo. Fusus is designed to maintain detailed records of who accessed cameras, when and why, according to the company rep who spoke at the Orland Park presentation.
Signal Cleveland asked the Cleveland Department of Public Safety for records of the dates and times that its personnel accessed integrated cameras in May but was told “there are no records that are responsive to your request.”
Ray, the CSU professor, calls Toledo’s use of the cameras “surveillance creep.”
“The argument for [more surveillance tools] is always, ‘Why not? We’re only going to use it if there’s been a crime. Wouldn’t you want to help if there’s been a crime?’” he said. “But this is the issue across the board with surveillance technologies — there are trade-offs. And the first big trade-off is, do we want to live in a society where police have this kind of automatic access?”
Leaders in Nashville, Tennessee, have decided they don’t. After a long political battle over a proposed new contract with Fusus, Mayor Freddie O’Connell recently reversed his earlier position and came out against using the technology, according to the Nashville Banner. O’Connell cited “erosions in the rule of law at the federal level” as his reason for being more cautious about police surveillance.
‘No data being collected’
Does access to homeowners’ and business owners’ security cameras help police prevent or solve more crimes? Cleveland police say yes, but the evidence is largely anecdotal.
“There have been numerous instances where the use of cameras enrolled with the SAFE SMART program likely played a key role — either partially or fully — in helping to piece together cases,” a police spokesperson wrote in response to questions from Signal Cleveland. “However, disclosing specific details could risk revealing the location of victims or witnesses. For this reason, we do not publicly share that information.”
In response to a question about measuring the effectiveness of the program, the city said, “There is no data being collected.”
A 2023 investigation by Undark, a science-focused nonprofit news organization, found “very little published data on the effectiveness of [doorbell cameras] as a crime prevention or deterrent tool.”
Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the news web site Daily Dot, “There aren’t good studies — good, replicable reports — that have been done on how effective at solving and addressing crime rates these technologies actually are.”
Cleveland police have not presented a policy for SAFE SMART CLE to the Cleveland Community Police Commission, the final authority on policing. Commissioner Piet van Lier told Signal Cleveland that “how the police use it and what it enables them to do is definitely an issue we want to address.”
