Experts: Axon's Fusus outscopes Flock in police surveillance

Flock's license plate readers get the attention and the lawsuits, but the surveillance infrastructure building out alongside them is bigger. NPR reports that real-time crime centers, software platforms that pull body-camera footage, dashcams, 911 dispatch, gunshot detectors and surveillance cameras into a single view for police, are the layer civil-liberties experts are more worried about.

The dominant product is Axon's Fusus, which the company bills as a "rapidly deployable real-time crime center in the cloud." Just over 100 law enforcement agencies had deployed it in 2024, and Axon told NPR the figure has more than doubled since. Benjamin Weir, a captain with the Oklahoma City Police Department, defended the setup in operational terms: "We could put analysts in a room and have them access 40 different systems, but that slows them down."

For Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, that is precisely the issue. "I have been watching the debate about Flock with a little bit of puzzlement, because real-time crime centers have not just ALPR cameras and sensors, but video analytics and drones," he told NPR. On misuse potential, he was blunter: "What happens if there is a government that wants to silence a particular group or even a particular person? And you just built the architecture of surveillance that makes that super-easy."

Rachel Levinson-Waldman, who directs the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, framed the shift as one of effort rather than legality. "As that friction gets lifted, it becomes easier and easier to do investigations, to look at people," she said. Ferguson's suggested guardrails, per the piece, include capping how long data is stored, mandating regular audits, and restricting surveillance near sensitive sites like abortion clinics and immigration courts.