Artificial intelligence is showing up in nearly every corner of our lives, from the shows we stream to the classrooms our kids sit in. One of the places it is spreading fastest, and with the least public attention, is surveillance.
The City of Tempe is already piloting Axon Enterprise's automated license plate readers (ALPRs) on its streets, as communities across Arizona reconsider how the technology is used. These cameras have become such an ordinary part of the landscape that most of us drive right past them without a second glance. That is exactly what makes them effective. They are logging our movements every day, and now artificial intelligence is behind the wheel.
Axon has also started piloting AI facial recognition inside its body cameras.
A device originally sold as a tool for police accountability now runs on technology with a documented track record of misidentifying people of color, which raises serious civil rights concerns.
The expansion does not end there. Axon recently unveiled Axon Vision, a system that uses AI to monitor connected CCTV feeds and strip away what little anonymity surveillance still leaves us. Axon says there are 85 million CCTV cameras in the United States. Layer in ALPRs and public and private camera feeds integrated through Axon’s Fusus platform for real-time tracking, and the picture gets much bigger.
Axon can call it whatever it wants. What is being built looks a lot like a national surveillance network.
There is a darker layer underneath all of this. Axon has significant contracts and relationships involving ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Its ties to the current administration's deportation operations run deep. Consider that Ronald Vitiello, now Acting Deputy Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, previously spent years leading Axon's DHS Program Strategy. ICE also issued a request for information for a potential five-year $220 million Taser contract two weeks after President Donald Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million in Axon stock. While the contract has not been awarded yet, procurement experts told CNBC that the specifications appeared to match only Axon products. Both the president and Axon CEO Rick Smith could benefit financially from the expanded immigration enforcement activity.
Is this really who Arizona cities want as a partner?
Axon will tell Arizona communities that its local systems stay separate from federal agencies. That assurance does not hold up to scrutiny. Federal agents have repeatedly obtained data from other local ALPR systems through informal officer-to-officer exchanges that sidestep formal rules entirely. A firewall means little when a company's customer is the federal enforcement apparatus itself.
The license plate readers going up in Tempe are the opening move for something much larger. It starts small, a handful of cameras and some free software, and it grows quietly in the background of daily life until one day it is no longer in the background at all.
My work leading Unity Rising is about giving young people, especially those who have been told for years that politics has no room for them, the organizing power to speak up and hold their leaders accountable. I have seen firsthand which neighborhoods absorb the most risk when surveillance infrastructure expands unchecked, and it is never the neighborhoods with power to spare. The young people growing up under the most watchful eyes need a political voice loud enough to stop programs like this before they take root. Arizona's cities should be asking hard questions about Axon before a contract is signed, not scrambling to answer them afterward. We deserve better than that.
Jacob George is the founder and executive director of Unity Rising, an Arizona-based civic engagement organization.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona cities should think twice about Axon's AI tools | Opinion
