Experts and community members are voicing privacy concerns about Lawrence’s adoption of the Axon Fusus program, a new system for residents to register and integrate security cameras for police use. 

The program may also reflect an industry strategy to encourage police departments to purchase more surveillance products, according to an expert who has done research on the topic. 

“I think the growing threat to privacy is much more expansive than people realize,” said Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. 

The Fusus program has two components. The first is an option for residents to register their security cameras with the police. These cameras would be put on a list for the police to request footage if an incident occurred nearby. The police department will not have access to live footage from resident cameras.

The second is an integration option, allowing businesses to purchase a custom device and subscription enabling the police department live access to camera feeds, with varying access levels determined by the camera owner. 

Both registration and integration are entirely voluntary. You can read more about the program in this article. 

A spokesperson for Axon did not respond to questions for this article. 

Lipton said the Fusus program raises privacy concerns for patrons of businesses with integrated cameras. The police department has said camera owners have full control over access to their cameras, but Lipton said that doesn’t take into account the consent of consumers in those spaces. Even if someone is engaging in benign activity, like picking up groceries, many still don’t want to feel like the police could be watching them without their knowledge, she said. 

Sgt. Drew Fennelly of the Lawrence Police Department said the technology has proven valuable in solving crimes while respecting privacy, pointing to a 2017 shooting in downtown Lawrence, where camera footage was key to the case, he said.

Officers follow strict policies and receive ongoing training to balance public safety with privacy rights, Fennelly said. Every action taken within the Fusus system is logged and stored, creating a trail for accountability. 

Lipton said assurances from police don’t always quell concerns. 

“What we’ve heard from other police departments is that they don’t have time, or they don’t have the interest in just jumping into cameras at any given time to spy on people,” Lipton said. “But the fact is that these cameras are being integrated into Fusus because they are recording and storing that information for some period of time.”

Lawrence resident Mandy Enfield said the Fusus program is causing confusion because of a lack of clear public information.

“This should have been a process that answered the community’s questions before any decisions were made,” Enfield said. “Instead, we got an Instagram post.”

She said calling it a camera registration program downplays what appears to be a much broader surveillance effort and shows a lack of transparency.

Leila Nashashibi, a campaigner at nonprofit digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, said partnerships like Fusus end up with law enforcement gaining backdoor access to a “vast, privately-run surveillance network made up of personal security cameras.” And the program allows them to do so without typical checks and balances, like obtaining a warrant. 

She said that although police often claim strict safeguards, they often find ways to bypass these restrictions. 

“Lawrence residents have every reason to be concerned about the growing threat to their privacy posed by the Connect Lawrence program,” she said.

Nashashibi said expanding surveillance will only worsen systemic discrimination against communities of color, and urged Lawrence residents to reject the program in favor of investments in public safety such as housing, jobs, education and health care.

“It’s not just activists at risk,” she said. “There are numerous documented cases of law enforcement officers misusing surveillance tools to spy on family members, romantic partners, exes, neighbors and others. These powers will be abused — history makes that clear.”

In one local instance, a former Lawrence police officer lost his law enforcement certification in 2022 after he was charged with misusing his credentials to seek out information about the driving records of the mother of his child amid a custody case. 

Axon business model pressures more surveillance, expert says

Lipton has researched how companies like Axon created a business model built on encouraging police departments to increasingly purchase surveillance technology. 

She said Axon creates integrated products that encourage customers to buy more. Though Axon may start by selling body cameras, they will quickly shift to pushing other surveillance products.

“They’ve been very good about leveraging each of their existing technologies and the relationships that they develop through that adoption,” she said. “They’re very good at leveraging that into additional purchases.”

Lawrence in 2019 began purchasing body cameras, intelligence software and more from Axon. In 2024, city commissioners approved a consolidated contract, including the addition of Fusus, that will cost a grand total of about $3.2 million through January 2029.

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When city commissioners voted to approve the consolidated contract, the agenda item said more than 100 terabytes of evidence was in Axon’s storage system. The agenda item said that without a new contract, the amount of digital evidence needing to be moved to another system would be “overwhelming.”

“They are trying to basically make the cost to the customer to switch vendors too high a barrier,” Lipton said. 

Fennelly said Axon has not pushed the department to use more products. 

“Each Axon product that we utilize was carefully evaluated and researched prior to purchase,” he said. “If this were not the case, we would not have renewed our contract with Axon.”

Fennelly said the police department is only pursuing voluntary partnerships with businesses for live integration, and has no interest in — and no capability for — capturing live feeds from home cameras.

At least for now. 

Ring, the biggest video doorbell provider in the U.S., inked a partnership with Axon this year and, according to Business Insider, is considering an integration option that would enable police access to livestreams from Ring devices.

And Axon has other products to offer. 

One extension of the Fusus program is a real-time crime center, a centralized unit where law enforcement analyzes live surveillance video. Real-time crime centers have raised concern from advocates because they collect vast amounts of surveillance data with little public oversight. Lipton said the push for real-time crime centers “really encourages the adoption of additional surveillance tools.” 

A real-time operations center was included — but was not recommended for funding — in Lawrence’s latest draft five-year capital improvement plan. 

There is also the growing potential of AI in the surveillance technology world, Lipton said. Further details on the Fusus program website state that the system uses artificial intelligence to rapidly search video provided to the system by users. Axon, the company behind Fusus, swore off facial recognition years ago but still uses its AI to automatically recognize weapons, vehicles and more.

“The entire surveillance apparatus is sort of shifting pretty rapidly right now, because a lot of the hopes and dreams associated with some of these technologies, and some of the hopes and dreams that people had related to using AI, are finally at a point where they are practically executable,” Lipton said.

Axon does not have a history free of controversy or privacy concerns.

Politico reported last year that a federal lawsuit filed by Axon competitor GovernmentGPT sought to ban the use of Axon’s body cameras at political events during the 2024 election cycle, alleging the devices contain components that pose national security risks.

In 2023, a Reuters investigation found Axon CEO Rick Smith’s origin story — that he founded the Taser company after two high school friends were shot — was largely untrue. The report also revealed that Smith and other executives received lavish compensation and perks, despite public claims of financial restraint. Axon used company resources to support personal projects and blurred lines between corporate and personal interests, according to the report.

Find out what’s really going on in your town. Read The Lawrence Times.

Cuyler Dunn (he/him), a contributor to The Lawrence Times since April 2022, is a student at the University of Kansas School of Journalism. He is a graduate of Lawrence High School where he was the editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, The Budget, and was named the 2022 Kansas High School Journalist of the Year. Read his complete bio here. Read more of his work for the Times here.

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