A Silicon Valley city will offer its residents free wireless doorbells equipped with cameras to help police collect video evidence.
The city council of Milpitas, a suburb north of San Jose, California, recently approved $60,000 to provide these devices on a one-camera-per-household, first-come, first-served basis, as was first reported by Milpitas Beat and confirmed by the Guardian.
City councilmember Evelyn Chua told the Milpitas Beat the doorbell camera initiative was intended to prevent crime. “Public safety is my top priority, and this door camera initiative is about strengthening crime prevention right where it matters most – at home,” she said.
“By equipping residents with tools and partnering closely with our Milpitas police department, we’re building a stronger connection between our community and law enforcement to help deter crime and protect our neighborhoods.”
Milpitas police plan to share a link for residents to voluntarily upload doorbell footage and organize community events, where residents can sign up to participate in the program, said Tyler Jamison, the Milpitas assistant chief of police.
“We don’t have access to any of the residential footage unless they were to share it with us,” he said.
An agenda from the city council’s 17 March meeting stated that the council directed staff to explore a similar program in San Leandro last summer, where the city provides Amazon Ring cameras to residents. The three options the Milpitas city council considered included one that explicitly laid out the purchase and distribution of Ring cameras; the company’s direct integration with the police department’s current digital management system was cited as an advantage.
Ring has been adopted as part of a free program in cities across the country, including local initiatives in New York City, Mount Vernon, Syracuse, Philadelphia, Jackson and Cleveland.
While Milpitas city council members have said the program aims to improve public safety, doorbell cameras – especially Amazon’s Ring – have increasingly come under scrutiny, for fear that they help law enforcement surveil neighborhoods.
It is unclear which company’s doorbell cameras Milpitas plans to distribute. But police have said it will not be Amazon’s Ring, which is already heavily integrated into police departments across the country.
Meeting notes show that staff ultimately recommended an option including cameras that “provide similar or equal capabilities” compared with Ring cameras. Minutes from the meeting state disadvantages of this option as having “no direct integration with police department’s current digital management system” and notes that “investigative requests will need to be made through social media platforms” and this “may delay investigations”.
Jamison said Ring cameras require subscription services to store footage, “and we didn’t want to place that burden on the residents”. Jamison also said all video received through the program was “100% voluntarily shared by residents”.
Privacy concerns about doorbell cameras came under a spotlight after Ring’s Super Bowl ad in February, which showed a neighborhood harnessing the power of technology to find her lost dog. Simply posting the dog’s photo through the Ring app automatically alerted a host of nearby cameras to use AI to look for a match, the ad says. But the reference to the AI-powered feature Search Party, meant to mimic the activity of a real one, evoked a surveillance dragnet.
