Just about anywhere somebody goes in Chicopee — from public parks or city buildings to even their own homes — there’s likely a surveillance camera nearby that police can access.
Those are the findings of The Shoestring’s investigation of the Chicopee Police Department’s new Real Time Crime Center — a massive surveillance network powered by software from policing technology firms including Axon Enterprise, Axis Communications, Milestone Systems, and Cellebrite.
The core of its surveillance network is hundreds of fixed “internet protocol,” or IP, security cameras, both city-owned and private devices that property owners can register with the police department. At the time of writing, there are 532 cameras in the network, the majority of which police can access live for any reason they wish. Previously, many consumer devices such as Ring doorbell cameras were not eligible devices for providing live access to police. But according to Business Insider, Ring is “exploring a new integration with Axon that would enable livestreaming from Ring devices for those who consent.”
This works out to a concentration of cameras nearly five times higher than the state’s capital. According to a 2024 surveillance transparency report, police in Boston managed a network of 1,400 cameras. The population of Boston is about 654,000 compared to the 55,000 people who live in Chicopee.
Using public records, The Shoestring has mapped 369 of Chicopee’s cameras. Because of the strategic placement of cameras at intersections, in public parks, schools, city buildings, and throughout all public housing projects run by the Chicopee Housing Authority, increasingly large swaths of the city are now subject to the possibility of 24/7 police surveillance.
Demographic data from the United States Census shows that the three census tracts with the lowest median incomes in the city, home to approximately 9,000 people, are where police have decided to place half of the city’s security cameras.
It’s a trend that’s playing out across the region and the country. Springfield police, for example, have a Real-Time Analysis Center that uses cameras, gunshot detection technology, license plate scanners, and more. Experts say that as the cost of obtaining those kinds of technologies has declined, companies are increasingly using their relationships with police departments, both big and small, to sell them on the idea of purchasing a whole new suite of surveillance tools.
“There is this sort of expanding world of surveillance technology that police departments, even very small police departments, are getting access to,” Beryl Lipton, a researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Shoestring.
The Chicopee Police Department has billed its growing surveillance network as a positive for the city. Deputy Chief Eric Watson, for example, said in a press release that it will “allow the Chicopee Police Department to operate more efficiently, effectively and with improved operational intelligence.”
“Connected communities are safer communities,” Watson said.
But that’s a disputed claim. Residents of Chicopee’s public housing, for example, expressed concern when The Shoestring told them about the network. And civil libertarians have long warned of the abuses of power that can result from the ability to constantly surveil people.
“We as residents, as civilians in this growing surveillance state, need to be hyper-aware of the policies that they have in place,” Lipton said. “Hyper-aware of the fact that they’re acquiring it to begin with, of the policies that they need to be putting into place to ensure that they are actually using it for legitimate investigative purposes, and of the mechanisms — or the lack thereof — for accountability should there be abuse of this type of high-powered surveillance.”
In response to questions from The Shoestring, Michael Pise, the chief of staff to Chicopee Mayor John Vieau, said in an email that Chicopee has “has provided our Police Department staff and officers with training and sent them to conferences and seminars to stay current with policing practices and processes.”
“We want to ensure we are in compliance with state and national requirements,” Pise said. “We seek to hold ourselves to high standards for professionalism and building public trust. In developing the Information Center here we have hired experienced and qualified personnel to operate the system.”
Pise said that before Chicopee had the system in place, the city was getting requests from residents and attorneys for footage. He said that for Vieau, who in February announced his intention to seek re-election, “safety is the number one thing.”
“He just wants people to be safe,” Pise said. “If you can’t feel safe at home you can’t sleep.”
***
Chicopee’s cameras feed a software platform called Fusus, from the company Axon Enterprise, which also manufactures tasers and body-worn cameras.
Axon Fusus serves as both a dashboard for police to easily access and manage their hundreds of camera feeds, as well as a public-private partnership that allows third parties to link their own internet-connected cameras into the police department’s crime center. Residents and business owners who don’t wish to purchase an Axon device that links to the police’s network can voluntarily add the locations of their own third-party cameras to the registry so that police can more easily identify relevant footage when investigating a crime.
The Shoestring relies on reader support to make independent news for western Massachusetts possible. You can support this kind of labor-intensive reporting by visiting our donate page.
In December 2024, the Chicopee City Council approved a $730,000 appropriation for the Real Time Crime Center, which included Fusus, new tasers, the creation of three new civilian positions, and body cameras for all 152 officers in the city. The purchase of body cameras was funded by a $250,000 grant from the state.
“These police companies are very intent on pushing their existing customers this idea that they need both the individual pieces of equipment that do the surveilling, like the body cameras or the fixed cameras or the license plate readers,” said Lipton, the Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher. “And they need a platform to help them make sense of all of this information.”
The Fusus platform costs the city $147,000 per year. It is part of a larger push by Axon, which was first listed on the S&P 500 index in May 2023, toward software sales. Contracts between Chicopee and the company — formerly Taser International — have more than quadrupled in the two years since, according to a review of the city’s open checkbook tool.
| Fiscal year | Total billed by Axon | Axon software billing | Percentage of Axon billing for software |
| FY25 | $351,367.32 | $290,847.32 | 82.78% |
| FY24 | $220,994.80 | $160,341.52 | 72.56% |
| FY23 | $76,957.60 | $0 | 0% |
| FY22 | $58,800.00 | $0 | 0% |
| FY21 | $68,088.34 | $0 | 0% |
| FY20 | $36,339.75 | $0 | 0% |
| FY19 | $35,889.75 | $0 | 0% |
Additionally, through its IT department, Chicopee has ramped up spending on new, AI-enabled security cameras, spending $1 million during the same time to upgrade its gadgetry. Most major intersections and parks have already been kitted out with a two-unit array, providing both a 360-degree viewpoint and a second pan-tilt-zoom camera.
Records obtained by The Shoestring show that these cameras come with on-device AI analytic capabilities, which are enabled by default. The city denies using these features.
According to a November 2024 investor pitch deck from Axon International, its annual recurring revenue — charging for services such as software licenses and cloud storage — has increased by $500 million since 2021. The same document predicts that its software, camera, and drone offerings will make up the majority of its business in the future, while its sale of tasers will make up only about 10%.
While the cameras Chicopee has purchased have the ability to analyze footage with AI, Watson, the deputy police chief, said the police department doesn’t use “any form of facial recognition.” When asked how the department uses computer vision tools to assist its work, Watson declined to comment.
While Chicopee is not among the municipalities in Massachusetts that have instituted bans on the use of facial recognition like Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Springfield, Northampton, Brookline, and Easthampton, there are no mentions of the city in the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security’s mandatory annual disclosures of facial recognition searches made by police.
Police are not prohibited from using facial recognition in Massachusetts, but it has become rare statewide following a 2020 law requiring a court order for its use. The law also specified that only the Registry of Motor Vehicles, the state police, or the FBI may perform these searches on behalf of local police departments and that the state must publish a report of all facial recognition searches annually. In 2023, police departments only requested 14 searches, according to the state’s data. And while that number tripled in 2024, only 14 of the 45 searches performed returned any results.
That law only applies to searches involving unique biometric identifiers, such as facial recognition or gait recognition, however. It does not apply to the use of artificial intelligence or machine learning to automate policing. Almost all the cameras reviewed by The Shoestring advertised some form of AI capabilities. These include the ability to count the number of people and cars that pass a camera’s view, and to process that data across multiple cameras. Some models even come equipped with something called “Loitering Guard,” a tool that tracks how long certain people have remained in protected areas.
The majority of the city’s cameras are made by the Swedish manufacturer Axis Communications, according to records obtained by The Shoestring. In addition to those, the Chicopee Housing Authority — an independent governmental agency from the city — has its residents under watch using a similar system to Fusus that is called Avigilon, which is made by Axon competitor Motorola. Chicopee police have access to those cameras, too, and audit logs show that about 10% of the department’s camera views occurred at residential locations managed by Chicopee Housing Authority.
The audit logs for Axon Fusus show that there have been over 3,000 individual views of security cameras by Chicopee police employees since January. The department said it did not have any responsive records earlier than that despite having first contracted for Fusus a year prior. The logs it provided indicated that all of these views were made of live, rather than recorded, video feeds. It has provided logs for recorded video only beginning May 15.
Hundreds of rows of the logs had missing timestamps that would indicate how long an employee viewed the footage. Based on what data was complete, the city has spent more than 300 hours watching live camera feeds since January, but less than three hours watching recorded streams. And while the logs contain a line that officers can fill out explaining their reason for viewing the camera feed, this was only filled out for a handful of entries.
On July 14, after The Shoestring asked both Watson and the mayor’s office why the city was unable to provide clarification about the audit logs, Watson said: “We remain transparent and have provided you with system generated data as requested, however, we will not try to interpret that data or speculate exactly how that data was created.”
***
“I feel like I’m the star of the Truman show,” Chicopee public-housing resident Danny Wench said, standing on the sidewalk admiring a sleek white Motorola Avigilon H4 multisensor camera mounted to the corner of the building, capturing a 360-degree viewpoint.
The device sends streams to both the police department and the main office of the Chicopee Housing Authority on Meeting House Road.
These cameras have also come at a significant price. Betsy Partyka-Narey, the executive director of the Chicopee Housing Authority, told The Shoestring that it had spent around $150,000 to install cameras around only one of its properties, and that it planned to spend over $600,000 installing new security systems at two additional properties this year.
Chicopee Housing Authority has at least 81 of its cameras connected to the police department through Fusus. It’s not the first time that police have used Fusus to increase their surveillance of public housing units. Reporting by Todd Feathers for Gizmodo found that in Toledo, Ohio, police were disproportionately surveilling public-housing residents.
Partyka-Narey didn’t directly answer questions about the placement of its cameras, many of which appear to point at the entrances to residents’ homes. In 2020, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the cumulative data of their comings and goings, regardless of their ability to afford physical barriers like fences, after police recorded the front door of a Lynn resident’s home 24/7 for 169 days in a row.
“I don’t know why someone would have a camera pointed at someone’s window,” Pise said after The Shoestring showed him a picture of one such pole camera. “I don’t think that’s allowed, I’d have to check with the police.”
Residents of the public housing units have voiced their concerns to The Shoestring.
One resident, who declined to give his name, said he was told the purpose of the cameras was to prevent illegal dumping. However, he pointed to a dumpster on the property still overflowing with trash.
Update: This article has been updated to correct the official name of the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Jonathan Gerhardson is a journalist in western Massachusetts.
Email: jon.gerhardson@proton.me
