Ring Nation Places Smart Security Company’s Issues Front And Center

True crime fans, however, are quick to point out that Ring cameras have solved murders that would not have been solved otherwise.

The family of a teen murdered in her home in Biloxi, Miss in February of 2020 found footage on their Ring camera of the five suspects entering and leaving the home. In fact, seeing an ambulance at the home on the camera was what let them know something was wrong. That footage helped police charge the suspects with capital murder and provide answers to a grieving family.

In January of 2020, the New York Times reported that UT football player Michael Egwuagu was arrested after being caught on Ring footage confessing to the murder of his pregnant sister. (Egwuagu was later found not guilty for reason of insanity).

In August 2021, a man stood outside a home in Las Vegas, ringing the doorbell while telling the woman behind the door that he planned to rape and murder the girl inside, and asking where she was. The woman was home alone, and the doorbell was a Ring camera. The clip was uploaded to Facebook where it quickly went viral, and someone was able to identify the man as Christopher Sumbs. Police were able to arrest Sumbs before anything worse happened, despite the fact that he denied being Christopher Sumbs when caught and was initially booked into Vegas county jail as John Doe.

Security cameras and electric doorbells have been around for a significant portion of the industrial revolution. The CCTV security system was invented in 1927. The electric doorbell was introduced to homes in the 1930s. By the 1970s, modern updates of both were available to large companies. The IP camera was introduced in 1996, allowing one to see the video feed anywhere in the world via the internet, according to Safehome.org. The technology was extremely expensive at the time, only accessible to corporations and the ultra-wealthy. That changed in 2012 when Jamie Siminoff invented the Doorbot Camera – which we now know as Ring.

By 2020, smart doorbells were a 1.83 billion dollar industry. The following is an oft-repeated stat but no less impressive – Ring sold a mind-blowing 400,000 devices, including smart doorbells, in Dec. 2019 alone, with the majority of those purchases being processed through Amazon.

And while the narrative continues to be that it is an overwhelmingly good thing that soon one in ten police departments may have access to your front door, the evidence fails to support it. With such a large market share over the past several years, one would expect the numbers of Ring-solved crimes to be higher than a handful.

As the forty civil rights groups that called to cancel Ring Nation stated, “[The show] is an advertisement for a bleak vision of the future, in which private megacorporations surveil our every move, sell us out to law enforcement, and profit off racism and hatred.”

If what we are looking at is thousands of people unfairly profiled and targeted versus a few criminals held responsible, then the Ring question more or less amounts to a trolley problem. And what’s more American than that?