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” (~$287M in 2025 ICE work) · won a U.S. Army software deal worth up to $10 billion
Data-fusion software that ties scattered records into one searchable picture of a person. Reporting that the administration tapped it to help build a cross-agency “master database” on Americans drew alarm; Palantir denies building any such tool.
Clearview AI
Private
Funded by: Peter Thiel was an early backer
Scale: Scraped ~50 billion faces from the web · sold to police, the FBI, ICE and DHS
A face-search engine fined more than €100 million across France, Italy, Greece, and the Netherlands — none of it paid. Its co-founder was pushed out as CEO in 2025.
SoundThinking (ShotSpotter)
Public · ~$107M market cap · ~$104M revenue
Funded by: Lauder Partners is the largest holder
Scale: Gunshot sensors in 170+ cities — though Chicago, Durham, and others have dropped it
Absorbed the assets of PredPol, the predictive-policing pioneer. Independent studies keep finding most alerts turn up no gun crime.
Motorola Solutions
Public · ~$67B market cap
Funded by: Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street
Scale: Powers Detroit's Project Green Light camera hub · owns the largest commercial plate database (Vigilant)
The quiet giant — radios, body cameras, real-time crime centers, plate readers, and Avigilon face-search. Its plate data has been tapped by ICE; it's the main rival to Flock.
On the figures above: valuations and market caps are as of 2025–26, drawn from SEC filings, company announcements, and reporting by TechCrunch, The Information, 404 Media, and OpenSecrets. Private-company numbers are last-disclosed round valuations and move over time; public market caps change daily. We cite the underlying reporting throughout the issue pages and the linked facts below.
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 ↗ - 07
ICE was shown demoing a phone app — powered by Motorola and Thomson Reuters data — that lets an agent scan a plate and pull up billions of records of where that car has been, enriched with marriage, voter, and credit data.
404 Media ↗
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 ↗Closer to home
We looked for a money trail to Detroit's officials. Here's the honest answer.
We dug through campaign-finance records looking for dollars tying Detroit's current council members or mayor to these surveillance and data-center decisions. The honest finding matters as much as a scandal would: we found no proven quid pro quo, no charges, and — strikingly — almost no surveillance-vendor campaign cash at all. The only documented gift is $1,000 from ShotSpotter's CEO to the mayor's 2013 race, eight years before the city bought the system. The surveillance story is one of weak oversight and contracts, not bribery.
The clearest documented money pattern isn't a camera company. It's a utility — DTE Energy — and it works at the state level, where the data-center power deals (and your electric bill) are actually decided.
- 01
DTE has given campaign money to 138 of Michigan's 148 state legislators.
Energy & Policy Institute ↗ - 02
It funds dark money: DTE disclosed giving $8 million to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit (Michigan Energy First) in 2024–25 alone.
Energy & Policy Institute ↗ - 03
The data-center power contracts are approved by the state Public Service Commission — not Detroit's City Council. The local “yes or no” is largely out of residents' hands.
Michigan PSC ↗ - 04
In 2026, DTE filed a $474M rate increase and offered to pause hikes if the Saline data center opens on time. The Attorney General called it “a ransom note.” DTE denies the linkage.
Planet Detroit ↗ - 05
More than 562,000 Michiganders signed a 2026 ballot initiative to ban utility companies from spending on politics.
Bridge Michigan ↗
How we read this:a donation is evidence of a relationship, not a deal. Where money and a decision line up in time, that's correlation, not proof — and we'll say so every time. Closer to City Hall, the big money is real estate (Gilbert, the Moroun family, the Sterling/Torgow group) funding campaigns. Worth noting honestly: when one billionaire's tax break came up, two of his biggest recipients voted no. Money buys access and a hearing. It doesn't always buy the vote — which is exactly why showing up still works.
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