Surveillance products
Most people arguing about this equipment have never seen it work. The clearest account of what a plate reader, a real-time crime centre or a drone-as-first-responder programme does is usually the manufacturer demonstrating it — which makes marketing useful evidence: a company describing a capability, on the record, with a date.
These are the sellers’ own films, with the reporting on them underneath. Read them as what they are.
Flock's own walkthrough of its drone-as-first-responder product. Shows multi-drone control from one operator, drones directed to a location during a pursuit, and aerial alerts pushed to officers. Useful for seeing what 'DFR' means in practice: a drone launched from a dock and flown to an address without anyone on scene requesting it.
Flock's product film for the Falcon, the fixed plate-reader camera that most of the contracts in this archive buy. Shows the camera reading plates and what Flock calls Vehicle Fingerprint - matching on make, colour, and features other than the plate itself.
Fusus explaining the real-time crime centre 'in the cloud'. This is the layer that matters most for reading the rest of this archive: the platform that takes feeds from cameras a city did not buy - private and business cameras enrolled by their owners - and puts them on one screen alongside plate readers and gunshot detection.
SoundThinking's account of how ShotSpotter's acoustic sensors detect and locate gunfire. The company's framing of the capability, in its own words.
How the Perimeter version of ShotSpotter detects gunfire around a single site rather than across a city.
The capability a promotional film demonstrates and the way a system is actually used are different questions. Both belong on the same page.
Reporting on Flock tightening safeguards after alleged misuse of plate readers by police to track women. The capability a promotional film demonstrates and the way it is actually used are different questions, and this catalogue holds both.
News coverage of Flock changing its practices after public objection to the plate-reader network. Catalogued beside the product films deliberately: the seller's description and the reporting on it are both part of understanding what the system does.
Films marked as a vendor's own are marketing. They are catalogued here because a manufacturer demonstrating its product is the clearest available account of what the equipment can do - not because the claims in them have been checked. Nothing a vendor says in one of these is treated as a fact anywhere else on this site, and news and investigative coverage is listed alongside for the same reason. Each film plays from the publisher's own platform; none of them are copied or hosted here.