How Amazon Ring uses domestic violence to market doorbell cameras

All the domestic violence programs placed requirements on survivors who wanted to participate. In San Antonio, individuals must have first filed a relevant police report. In Cape Coral, a protective order was required, and anyone receiving a camera had to agree to hand over Ring footage to the police if asked, or risk losing the camera. Bexar County required “that the survivor be fully cooperative with law enforcement and the District Attorney’s office” in prosecuting the case, according to an emailed statement from the department’s public information office.

To recruit participants, a victims’ advocate typically would reach out after an incident of violence, or when a police report had been filed or an injunction granted. San Antonio, which runs the largest of the three programs, would conduct a threat assessment of survivors interested in the program, considering factors such as whether the case involved weapons, stalking, a history of protective-order violations, or escalating violence. San Antonio did not require participants to have protective orders, but took them into account as one factor when deciding whom to accept into the program.

SAPD also put a lot of weight on whether individual investigating officers felt like a camera would be “beneficial to the case,” either by providing an additional layer of security to the survivor or offering evidence that could strengthen a prosecutor’s hand, Gamez says. 

In Bexar County, devices were donated to the sheriff’s office in exchange for the office promoting the Neighbors app. Emails show Ring planned to send the sheriff’s office 15 cameras for 279 app downloads by residents in September 2018 alone.

Smith, in Cape Coral, received her camera in early 2020, shortly after her ex had violated the protective order she had taken out against him. She was visited by a victim services advocate, Christine Seymour, who ran Cape Coral’s camera program. Smith says she had heard of Ring but had never thought about purchasing one of the video doorbells herself. But when the service was offered free—the device normally costs at least $99, plus an optional annual video storage subscription fee of at least $30—she said yes. 

Seymour had the camera with her, but the police department was not responsible for installing it—Smith’s father did it for her. Seymour also gave Smith a “participant agreement”—a contract between those receiving cameras and the Cape Coral Police Department. Anyone taking part agreed to keep their injunctions active. Participants also acknowledged, “I may be removed from the program if I refuse to provide requested footage” to the police. 

It’s not clear how popular these programs have been. The San Antonio program distributed 158 of its 171 cameras. However, in the first year of Bexar County’s program, no more than 15 survivors signed up for one of its 50 cameras, according to Rosalinda Hibron-Pineda, a victim services specialist at the sheriff’s office. And in Cape Coral, where 100 cameras were available, Seymour said that only 24 had been given out. 

“We really thought we would be more inundated,” Seymour said in a phone interview in September 2020. “We’re really not, which is kind of a nice thing.” Many people had expressed interest, she added, only to change their minds when they were told an injunction would be required. When a survivor expressed those doubts, Seymour said she told them, “Well, I’m sorry, then you won’t qualify.”

Without giving law enforcement the tools to arrest and jail abusers, she said, the cameras wouldn’t be effective. “I mean, the whole purpose is to stop this. There’s no teeth [without an injunction].”