Inside Amazon’s Aggressive Push To Get Cops Using AI Surveillance

Forbes Daily Briefing

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4.6 • 12 Ratings

🗓️ 7 October 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

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Summary

With a growing roster of partners, Amazon has been peddling AI drone surveillance, gun detection and real-time crime center tech to law enforcement agencies, public records reveal.

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0:00.0	Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, October 7th.
0:05.2	Today on Forbes, inside Amazon's aggressive push to get cops using AI surveillance.
0:12.4	In mid-20203, the San Diego County Sheriff's Office was looking to improve its drone surveillance operations.
0:20.0	Among those vying to help were typical law enforcement providers, and one other,
0:25.0	Amazon Web Services.
0:27.5	The company pitched a prototype of an AI tool capable of detecting weapons, or any object of interest,
0:33.1	in live surveillance photos and video, sending text alerts to cops with their location.
0:38.3	San Diego County took a demo, but passed.
0:42.3	Similarly, after testing out the live streaming software powering Amazon's Twitch gaming platform
0:48.3	to stream its real-time drone footage,
0:50.3	the agency went with a different provider, Nomad Media.
0:58.1	But the world's biggest everything store will still collect a check on that deal.
1:02.9	Nomad is closely partnered with Amazon Web Services, or AWS.
1:10.0	It runs its software on AWS Cloud, and its object detection, should San Diego or other customers choose to use it, is powered by
1:11.9	recognition, Amazon's AI Image and Video Analysis Service. Nomad CEO Adam Miller told Forbes
1:19.2	his company often goes to market with Amazon. He said, quote, we use a tremendous number of
1:25.0	their AWS services.
1:30.9	It's a model that's working well for Amazon and its partners,
1:35.1	as they seek to grab a slice of the $11 billion police tech market.
1:38.8	Emails with police agencies up and down the West Coast show Amazon's law enforcement and school safety team,
1:42.4	led by a former police officer from Washington
1:44.5	State, is aggressively courting new customers.
	...

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