US town turns to AI surveillance to fight crime, privacy fears rise

Dunwoody, Georgia, rolls out AI cameras, drones, and gunshot detectors to reduce crime-but critics warn of surveillance overreach and privacy erosion

A small city in Georgia has joined the growing list of US municipalities deploying artificial intelligence-driven surveillance technology to fight crime.

 

According to a report by Forbes, police in Dunwoody, a suburb of Atlanta, have rolled out monitoring tools supplied by Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company headquartered in Atlanta. These tools include cameras, gunshot detectors and drones.

 

Flock Safety founder Garrett Langley believes the company could help eradicate crime in the US within 10 years by combining AI tools with social programmes. The company is also developing an AI platform called Nova, designed to integrate surveillance data with public records—a move critics have deemed a major privacy risk. 

How AI surveillance works

In Dunwoody, police have deployed more than 100 Flock cameras, gunshot detectors, and drones. The devices automatically capture licence plates and vehicle characteristics such as model, colour and visible damage, uploading the information to Flock’s cloud-based platform.

 

Law enforcement can then search the database, track vehicles across jurisdictions, link incidents, analyse live feeds, and use AI tools to transcribe 911 calls.