Follow the power
Who profits when a city watches itself?
The technology on Detroit's table isn't sold by the city, or by police. It's sold by a small group of fast-growing companies — most backed by the same Silicon Valley investors, subsidized by the same federal grants, and increasingly merging into one another.
The ACLU named this two decades ago: a “surveillance-industrial complex,” where governments lean on private companies to watch the public at a scale they couldn't reach alone. Following the money makes the stakes clear.
The players
Six companies, mostly the same backers
Flock Safety
Private · ~$7.5B valuation
Funded by: Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Bedrock, Y Combinator
Scale: ~$300M revenue · 5,000+ communities · 20 billion vehicle scans a month
The license-plate-camera company now expanding into drones.
Skydio
Private · ~$4.4B valuation
Funded by: Andreessen Horowitz–anchored from the start
Scale: 1,000+ police agencies · over half its business is now defense
Quit consumer drones to focus on police and military. Detroit's documented vendor.
Axon (formerly TASER)
Public · ~$37B market cap
Funded by: Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street
Scale: Works with roughly 17,000 of ~18,000 U.S. law-enforcement agencies
Tasers + body cameras + the evidence cloud + drones + AI report-writing — the dominant vendor.
Palantir
Public · ~$270B market cap
Funded by: Founded by Peter Thiel; early money from the CIA's venture arm
Scale: Built ICE's “ImmigrationOS”; ICE's largest surveillance-tech contractor
Data-fusion software that ties scattered records into one searchable picture of a person.
Clearview AI
Private
Funded by: Peter Thiel was an early backer
Scale: Scraped billions of faces from the web · sold to 3,100+ agencies incl. the FBI and DHS
A face-search engine fined €65M+ across Europe — fines it has not paid.
SoundThinking (ShotSpotter)
Public · ~$107M market cap
Funded by: Lauder Partners is the largest holder
Scale: Gunshot sensors in 170+ cities
Absorbed the assets of PredPol, the predictive-policing pioneer.
The growth playbook
How they get into a city — and stay
Free trials, then lock-in
Vendors seed cash-strapped departments with free cameras and pilots. Once a system is woven into daily 911 dispatch, canceling means taking away a tool officers rely on — and that's when the real price appears.
Federal money pays for it
Two big grant streams — DHS homeland-security grants (~$553M/yr) and DOJ's Byrne-JAG (~$270M/yr) — subsidize local purchases. Vendors lobby to fund the grants, then help police apply for them.
Subscriptions, not gadgets
The money is in recurring software and cloud storage on multi-year contracts. Once a department's evidence lives in a vendor's cloud, leaving becomes prohibitively expensive.
The network effect
Each new camera makes the searchable national grid more valuable to everyone on it — and that shared grid is the mechanism behind the federal-access controversies.
The revolving door
The people selling these systems are often the people who used to run police departments. Former chiefs and commissioners — including William Bratton — sit on vendor boards, and ex-officials move into companies like Palantir. Federal lobbying has surged in step with the contracts: Palantir spent about $6 million in 2025, Axon about $2.5 million, and Flock jumped from $90,000 to $690,000 in a single year.
The merger wave
The market is consolidating into a few one-stop shops. Flock bought a drone startup (Aerodome) for over $300 million to add aircraft to its cameras. Axon — already body cameras plus the evidence cloud — bought a real-time-crime-center company, a counter-drone firm, and a 911 platform, and partnered with Skydio on drones. The goal is a single “public-safety operating system” that's very hard to leave.
On the record
What this system has already done
- 01
Local police ran 4,000+ searches of Flock's national camera network on behalf of ICE — even though ICE had no formal contract with the company.
404 Media ↗ - 02
A state found Flock broke the law: Illinois' audit found federal agents had accessed protected data — an audit triggered by Texas police searching the network for a woman who left the state for an abortion.
Illinois Secretary of State ↗ - 03
A study found 89% of Chicago ShotSpotter alerts turned up no gun crime — and one alert sent the officer who killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo.
MacArthur Justice Center ↗ - 04
Michael Williams spent nearly a year in jail on a murder charge built largely on a ShotSpotter alert before it was dropped. Chicago agreed to pay him about $500,000.
WTTW ↗ - 05
Clearview scraped billions of faces without consent — then had its entire client list stolen, revealing ICE, police departments, and retailers as users.
Engadget ↗ - 06
Nine of the twelve members of Axon's own AI ethics board resigned after the company proposed a Taser-equipped drone.
NPR ↗
In their own words
“Our goal is not to just solve every crime. Our goal is to eliminate it from happening.”
Garrett Langley
CEO, Flock Safety ↗“We are on a mission to make the bullet obsolete.”
Rick Smith
CEO, Axon ↗“Are we building a database that can be used for surveillance? No. [But] if you're legally surveilled… could you put it in our product? Yes.”
Alex Karp
CEO, Palantir ↗“Leveraging the private sector vastly expands the government's capacity to invade our lives.”
Jay Stanley
ACLU, who named the “surveillance-industrial complex” in 2004 ↗Show up when it counts
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