
Cops Are Giving Amazon's Ring Real-Time 911 Data - danso
https://gizmodo.com/cops-are-giving-amazons-ring-your-real-time-911-data-1836883867
======
ars
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.

~~~
danso
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](https://www.yelp.com/healthscores)

~~~
allana
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.

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toomuchtodo
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.

~~~
nine_k
What makes distress calls public data?

~~~
toomuchtodo
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.

~~~
jrnichols
> you can always pull it from radio over the air

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

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groovybits
> “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).

~~~
danso
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...](https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--
b8xmxPEh--/c_fit,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/vgy2hfycyhnyxhjn0xxi.png)

