In mid-2023, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office was looking to improve its drone surveillance operations. Among those vying to help were typical law enforcement providers, and one other: Amazon Web Services. The company pitched a prototype of an AI tool capable of detecting weapons or any object of interest in live surveillance photos and video, sending text alerts to cops with their location. San Diego County took a demo but passed. Similarly, after testing out the live streaming software powering Amazon’s Twitch gaming platform to stream its real-time drone footage, the agency went with a different provider, Nomad Media. But the world’s biggest everything store will still collect a check on that deal. Nomad is closely partnered with Amazon Web Services. It runs its software on AWS cloud and its object detection, should San Diego or other customers choose to use it, is powered by Rekognition, Amazon’s AI image and video analysis service. Nomad CEO Adam Miller told Forbes his company often goes to market with Amazon. “We use a tremendous number of their AWS services,” Miller said.

Full feature : AWS is aggressively promoting AI surveillance tech to law enforcement agencies, partnering with companies such as Flock Safety and ZeroEyes.