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You’ve probably heard about the new surveillance tech Lawrence is adopting, but most people don’t know how dangerous the system is for people who need abortions and gender-affirming care, and for immigrants.
City commissioners voted late last year to approve a $3.2 million contract with Axon, which is a billion-dollar surveillance company that got its start in tasers, made LOTS of cities their clients by making police body cameras and is rapidly expanding. There are about a thousand red flags in that sentence alone, but commissioners approved the contract through the “consent agenda.” That means there was zero discussion or public input. And buried in that contract was a $270,000 line item for Fusus, a surveillance data integration platform powered by AI.
Meanwhile, over 70% of the abortions performed in Kansas are on people who’ve been forced to leave home because abortion is banned in their state. Thousands of Texans, Oklahomans, Missourians, Arkansans and Louisianans have had abortions in Kansas City. And many of those people come through Lawrence on their drive west or north. With gender-affirming care for minors banned in Kansas, people also drive from Lawrence to get care in other states.
It’s bad enough that those folks, who deserve to get care where they live, have to drive upwards of 12 hours to have control over their bodies. But there’s an added dystopian layer here, because their movement to and from clinics can be tracked using tools called Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPRs, which take and store pictures of license plates, like at toll roads for example.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory — that people’s movements to clinics can be tracked using their license plates — but I can assure you it’s very real. This May, Texas cops searched more than 83,000 ALPR cameras all over the country to try to catch a woman they suspected of having an abortion in another state. We know the Department of Justice is on an anti-trans crusade, issuing subpoenas even last month to 20 gender-affirming care providers to find out who’s getting gender-affirming care.
And undocumented immigrants don’t have to be crossing state lines at all for ALPR data to put their safety at risk. ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and police departments from other states access ALPR data during immigration investigations all the time, even in states like California and Illinois with laws that are supposed to stop that from happening.
So here’s where Axon, Fusus, abortion, gender-affirming care, and immigration come together: As I speak, the city has signed off on Axon integrating ALPR, traffic, city and private cameras into a searchable system, again, powered by AI, which is only increasing in its power and sophistication. More than 100 traffic cameras are already plugged into this system, and they’ve prepared 280 of 343 city cameras to be integrated as well. If Lawrence finishes uploading all city cameras into Axon before pausing the program like we’re demanding, they’ll have tripled the number of camera feeds going into a database of footage of our town.
There are NO regulations or oversight to prevent this expanded ALPR data from being used to track down abortion seekers, minors getting gender-affirming care, or immigrants if a police officer or prosecutor from another state or a federal agency demands it.
And that would be bad enough. It gets worse, because the Axon system is designed for all the data it contains to be made accessible to any other city, state, or federal agency that uses the same technology. There are, again, zero regulations preventing the Lawrence Police Department from making a massive amount of camera footage from our city sharable systemwide.
Stopping the abuse of surveillance in Lawrence is up to us. The City of Lawrence has to pause the Axon program unless or until we have regulations preventing this AI-powered surveillance project from sharing data with police and prosecutors from other states or the Trump administration looking to criminalize people for having abortions or getting gender-affirming care.
Lawrence voted overwhelmingly to keep the right to abortion in our state constitution. We’ve pressured our city to not comply with anti-trans state laws. We’ve demanded to be a sanctuary city. If we’d known about this Axon contract, there’s absolutely no way the people of Lawrence would have co-signed a program that risks the privacy and the dignity of abortion seekers, trans folks and immigrants.
Please join me in telling our city commission at 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 9 at City Hall: pause the program and don’t let it move forward until we have an ironclad guarantee it can’t and won’t be used to hunt abortion seekers, or trans youth and their families, or undocumented people, or anybody else trying to build a better future for themselves in Lawrence.
You can find more information about next steps and how to talk to city commissioners in person or online at the Lawrence Transparency Project. Let’s get to it.
About the writer
Elise Higgins (they/she) is a Lawrence-based abortion rights advocate, researcher and community organizer. They’re a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, a member of Plymouth United Church of Christ and a volunteer with Sanctuary Alliance Lawrence, Kansas.
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