Akron Police are now partnering with the doorbell camera company RING.
The short version: Akron PD's new Ring partnership adds another surveillance pipeline that, paired with license plate readers, builds a fuller picture of residents' daily movements.
Our Take
News 5 Cleveland reports Akron Police are teaming up with Ring, the Amazon-owned doorbell camera company, giving officers a smoother path to request footage from residents' front-porch cameras. On its face, it sounds like neighborly cooperation. In practice, it's one more node plugged into a growing web of always-on monitoring that most people never explicitly signed up for.
These partnerships matter because they normalize the idea that private cameras are an extension of police infrastructure. Combine a street full of Ring doorbells with a nearby Flock Safety ALPR camera silently logging every plate that drives by, and you get a surveillance dragnet that captures who visits your house and where your car goes — all without a warrant, and often without you ever knowing footage was pulled. Akron already hosts Flock cameras, so this Ring deal isn't an isolated development; it's another layer stacked onto an existing tracking system.
If you want to see what's already watching your street, check our camera map, and if you'd rather push back than just watch it happen, our take-action page has concrete steps for holding local police accountable.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of News 5 Cleveland, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.