In a time when many Americans and even mainstream news outlets are increasingly wary of creeping police and surveillance technology, the Boston Globe partnered with and published a pay-to-play plug for Big Brother.
The regional outlet of record’s Tech Innovation Summit in June was presented by Axon, the publicly-traded company behind concepts like Smart Capture, an AI-powered feature that scans IDs and extracts data on potential suspects. Attendees on the 33rd floor of 60 State Street were treated to a 25-minute infomercial on the theme of “Reimagining Public Safety Through Seamless Interoperability for a Smarter Future.”
The Globe also ran sponsored content online for Axon under the headline, “From call to closure: How a new generation of public safety technology is protecting more lives.” It is the rare Globe article that non-subscribers can reach behind the newspaper’s hard paywall.
The Arizona-based Axon has been a significant commonwealth vendor for years, perhaps best known for its Tasers which can be found on the belts of law enforcement officers statewide. The company’s contracts with Mass State Police for electronic control weapons were the subject of a 2019 Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism investigation with MuckRock and Emerson College journalism students that in part led to the indictment and prosecution of the former head of the MSP union.
Tasers are just one dish on a growing menu. The current Axon catalog lists nearly 50 products, several integrating AI features into versions of the body cameras it is widely noted for providing law enforcement. The company is also into real-time operations and records management, and as BINJ contributor Dana Forsythe reported last year, it has contracted with Mass State Police on drone-detection equipment since 2023.
Recently, Axon has emerged as one of the leading surveillance tech vendors challenging Flock Safety for market share, including in Boston where it’s currently running a pilot program. Flock has caught the ire of more than just Fourth Amendment advocates, with dissent going mainstream these past few months, opening the lane for competition. The Globe has flanked Flock cameras before, but itself noted (behind the paywall) last week: “Axon and Motorola carry seemingly identical features to Flock—and for critics, identical concerns. And in Boston, disclosure of the pilot programs triggered a separate dispute: whether Mayor Wu’s administration should have sought permission from the City Council first.”
In a blog post from last week, the ACLU warned, “Like Flock and Motorola, [Axon] is seeking to become a broad ‘operating system of police departments,’ which has ominous implications we detailed in a recent white paper. Axon has been aggressively expanding its law enforcement products, including by pushing premature uses of AI. Many Flock customers already have contracts with Axon for body cameras and other products, making a switch to Axon all the easier—especially since Axon is pursuing an explicit strategy of bundling multiple technologies and services together in long-term contracts. That raises significant concerns over platform dependence and lock-in.”
Axon’s sponsored content in the Globe is an advertisement for that comprehensive bundle. The article extolls Carbyne, its emergency response platform, as well as “Drone as First Responder programs.” Network cameras, the piece argues, are key to cracking down on “more than $130 billion” in annual retail crime in the US. And this can all be done responsibly, since “AI-enabled tools are designed to enhance the capabilities of public safety professionals, not to substitute for their judgment.”
The tone was similar at the Tech Innovation Summit, where the three subjects on stage for the first panel were two Axon employees and the acting chief of police from the Chicopee Police Department. Before topics like “The Future of Technical Education” and “Autonomous Vehicles in a City Built Before Cars,” registrants learned from the underwriters about how “a new generation of public safety technology is transforming how agencies respond and protect communities,” and what Axon does “quietly, for all of us.”
“When we think about how to make communities safer, the real magic here is in the connective tissue and building connected experiences across the entire public safety ecosystem,” said Aisa Ayer, a VP of product management for Axon. “What we’re building is that connected infrastructure so that officers, command staff, administrators, they’re not hunting and pecking for information. It’s all there at their fingertips ready to be used.”
Introduced as the head of a department that is an “emerging” “leader in public safety,” Chicopee Acting Chief of Police Eric Watson described the city’s composite relationship with Axon: “… everything from body cameras to cruiser cameras to license plate recognition, real-time operations software, VR training, pretty much the whole gamut of products.”
In March, BINJ contributor Jonathan Gerhardson reported that Chicopee spent funds meant to mitigate the scourge of opioids on a “data-aggregation and coordination platform” for its police department’s “Real Time Information Center.” Last week, Mother Jones revealed that the western Mass city committed more than $800,000, including remediation dollars, “to pay for expensive contracts with Peregrine, an AI-driven data aggregation and police surveillance platform.” That’s for use in coordination with the tech Watson mentioned.
At one point in the Globe tech summit interview, Axon’s senior director of government affairs was asked how the company goes about building “ethical technology.” Stumbling through an apparent script by her side, she said, “We work to make it easy. We work to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder to do. What that means is just because we can build something doesn’t necessarily mean that we should.”
