Am image showing a doorbell camera, a police car and a sign that reads “Notice: This area under video surveillance.”
The SAFE SMART CLE program is intended to give Cleveland police greater access to video from privately owned security cameras.

If you have a doorbell camera at home, or you own a business that uses security cameras, you can make video from them available to Cleveland police to help in investigations. The program is called SAFE SMART CLE. 

The city launched it in 2023 with high expectations. “It’s our hope, by empowering residents and businesses to be part of the solution, that we’ll be able to save more lives together,” Mayor Justin Bibb said at the time. He has continued to promote the program.

Residents and business owners can register on the ConnectCleveland.org web site. Thousands of Cleveland residents and businesses have signed up already. 

That website is short on details about what might happen next, and the city did not provide much more clarity in response to questions from Signal Cleveland. Here’s what we did learn.

What is SAFE SMART CLE?

It’s a program that helps Cleveland’s Department of Public Safety (police, fire, EMTs and Animal Control) obtain video from privately owned security cameras. There are two ways to participate:

• Residents can register cameras they use outside their homes, like the popular Amazon Ring and Google Nest models, with the city. Registering a camera does not give the police remote access to it, it just saves them time. When investigating a crime, rather than going door to door, police can check the list of registered cameras in the area, then email, call or visit those residents to ask for video footage from a certain date and time.

• Business owners can give the police remote access to their security cameras, including the ability to view live footage at the city’s Real Time Crime Center (RTCC), where public safety personnel can see images from a variety of city-owned cameras through a software platform called Fusus (pronounced “fuse us”). 

A small device called a CORE allows privately owned cameras to connect to Fusus; this is called integration. The camera owner controls the settings on the CORE device and does not have to allow real-time access.

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Only “approved users within the Department of Public Safety” can see the list of registered and integrated cameras, according to the city.

If I integrate a camera at my business, will police monitor it 24/7?

No. If a camera owner opts to provide real-time access, public safety personnel only tune in when a crime or emergency has been reported at that site or close by, police said.

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Who owns Fusus?

Fusus is owned and sold by Axon, which grew out of TASER, the company behind the weapon of the same name that’s widely used in law enforcement. Axon offers a wide range of Tasers, cameras, software platforms and drones for public safety and private security clients.

Does connecting police with business and home security cameras help solve crimes?

The Cleveland police say it does, but won’t provide specifics.

“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.”

In June 2024, a Ring camera captured part of the chaos at a mass shooting at a party in Akron. A year later, investigators haved identified multiple suspects — based on tips — but lacked enough evidence to bring charges.

But solving crimes isn’t the only rationale for the program. Integrated cameras that are set up for live access can provide “critical information … that can then be relayed to paramedics, firefighters, officers, and other first responders allowing for a faster and more appropriate response to an incident,” according to a city statement from 2023.

Questions the city was “unable to answer”

The city said that “due to the distinct nature of every case,” it was “unable to answer” the following questions: 

If I declined to provide video from my camera, could the police get a subpoena for it?

If video from my camera were used in court, could I be called to testify?

Would my name or address appear in court documents?

Would video used in a prosecution become a public record? 

Jonathan Witmer-Rich, a professor at Cleveland State University’s College of Law, told Signal Cleveland that it’s “definitely a possibility” that someone could be subpoenaed and/or called to testify at a trial if their camera captured video that prosecutors considered relevant to a case. But that’s true of an unregistered camera too.

If you have other questions about SAFE SMART CLE, or if you’re enrolled and want to talk about it, contact Frank W. Lewis at [email protected].

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Associate Editor and Director of the Editors’ Bureau (he/him)
Important stories are hiding everywhere, and my favorite part of journalism has always been the collaboration, working with colleagues to find the patterns in the information we’re constantly gathering. I don’t care whose name appears in the byline; the work is its own reward. As Batman said to Commissioner Gordon in “The Dark Knight,” “I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.”