Smile, You’re on Neighborhood Watch: Local Police is Crowdsourcing Surveillance with Ring Cameras

9:02 AM, 10/30/2025

Being human comes with “othering”—the social and cognitive act of delineating “us vs. them.” Starting in the 1970s as a reaction to the civil rights movement, white neighborhoods embraced the essence of othering when they created and expanded variations of the neighborhood watch: citizen patrols carrying nightsticks and receiving training from the local police, “vigilante grannies,” home owner association leaders organizing educational meetings—all ordinary people empowered to police communities unbound by constitutional restraints.

Half a century after the National Sheriffs Association expanded citizen policing efforts, the impulse to watch still runs strong in American neighborhoods. Today, citizens just do it with better tech—through the lens of Ring cameras.

Upon its release in 2013, Ring was designed with home protection in mind. Quoted by the founder to be a “pre-crime” system, Ring succeeded because it did more than simply react to break-ins, as most home security products did at the time. It prevented crime by informing potential criminals, loiterers, and solicitors that they were being watched and their actions recorded. It is no wonder that Amazon, notoriously battling PR crises due to porch pirates, in 2018 acquired such a technology to amplify the reach of its smart home technology, Alexa. After all, the alternative was delivering packages into customers’ trunks.

Amazon had already been comfortable working with local police officers at the time of acquisition. They had already funded and organized sting operations to catch porch pirates. So, it was not much of a leap when, in 2019, Ring created the “community alert”—synonymous with “neighborhood watch,” right?—program, allowing police to request consumers’ porch footage. Ring also recruited police to help sell their cameras, incentivizing people to buy Ring products with tax-payer money. Though Amazon did not invent the neighborhood watch, the goliath corporation acquired and monetized it.

A savvy business move, this partnership fomented—as the Electronic Frontier Foundation eloquently put it—“a vicious cycle in which police promote the adoption of Ring, Ring terrifies people into thinking their homes are in danger, and then Amazon sells more cameras.”

We are not being forced into surveillance; we’re volunteering for it.

Systems like “community alert” are not true 1984 big-brother technology, since they do not allow police to directly record peoples’ doorsteps without a warrant. Instead, they allow police to request videos from users, and average citizens can forward video to police with the push of a button. People are more likely to be comfortable with a “little brother” approach—one where “the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import share[s] the results with the rest of us.”

Ring’s recent deals with Flock and Axon make it even easier for police to request Ring footage. The deals protect the chain of custody by allowing the video to go directly from Ring’s servers to Flock, who then provides it to police along with other data it has traditionally provided local law enforcement—like your location.

With these deals in place, it is only a matter of time before a creative investigator provides Ring footage obtained by these private entities to a DA’s office. However, the prosecutors may not be able to do much with it. One North Carolina ADA I spoke with explained that in his experience, Ring footage has been prone to evidentiary issues in court. First, the footage can be grainy, making identification difficult or impossible. Second, the people who provide footage are often uninterested in coming to court to testify to the footage’s authenticity. And third, it is difficult to establish that the footage has not been edited or altered sometime between the recording on the Ring hardware, uploaded to an app or cloud, and then shared in a non-traditional method with police officers.

If defense counsel can exploit such vulnerabilities, then do doorbell camera really contribute to public safety? If not, then Ring is not dealing in safety, but rather reassurance. Ring allows us to look at a feed from the safety of our homes and make immediate judgements as to who belongs on our porch, in our neighborhood, and in our communities. This is why we are not being forced into surveillance; we’re volunteering for it. Our neighborhood watchers are trading privacy for the feeling of safety, reviving the same old impulse to “other” that prompted the expansion of community policing in the ‘70s. Ring’s partnerships with law enforcement today ultimately make communities no safer—just more watched, and more afraid.

John Speirs

John received his undergraduate degree from UCLA, where he majored in Korean and minored in Professional Writing. He previously interned with the Chatham County District Attorney’s Office. At UNC School of Law, he writes for the North Carolina Journal of Law and Technology and serves as Treasurer for Parents as Law Students (PALS). In his free time, he enjoys reading with his 18-month-old son and cooking for friends and family.