Ring announces partnerships with 400+ police departments, building massive surveillance network

Ring announced it had established partnerships with more than 400 police departments across the United States, marking the first time the company publicly disclosed the scale of its law enforcement surveillance network. The announcement revealed that since Amazon’s 2018 acquisition, Ring had been rapidly expanding a program allowing police to request and access doorbell camera footage from residents, effectively building what civil liberties advocates called “the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen.”

Partnership Structure and Police Access

The partnerships enabled police departments to create verified accounts on Ring’s Neighbors app, post safety information, and critically, request video recordings from Ring users within specific geographic areas and timeframes. Police could make these requests without obtaining warrants, relying instead on voluntary compliance from camera owners. In 2020 alone, police would make over 20,000 such requests through the platform.

Expansion to One in Ten Departments

The network continued its explosive growth: by 2021, Ring had brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, representing approximately one in ten police departments across the United States. The Markup later documented that by 2023, Ring had partnered with 2,600 police departments, demonstrating the ongoing expansion of this warrantless surveillance infrastructure.

Civil Liberties Concerns

The Electronic Frontier Foundation identified five major concerns with Ring’s police deals: the voluntary sharing system encouraged bulk collection of footage, partnerships lacked transparency, police received no training on proper use, Ring’s terms of service allowed indefinite retention of footage by police, and the system created a troubling expansion of government surveillance capacity without judicial oversight. Privacy International characterized the program as creating a “privatized surveillance state” that degraded public trust while expanding law enforcement’s ability to monitor communities without constitutional protections.