Amazon on Monday became the latest tech company to face criticism for sharing public-facing statements supporting police reform and the Black Lives Matter movement while continuing internal policies and business practices that perpetuate the status quo.
Amazon on Twitter has called for an end to "the inequitable and brutal treatment of black people" in the US and has put a "Black lives matter" banner at the top of its home page. Its chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, on Sunday posted on Instagram an email from a customer criticizing the BLM banner on Amazon's home page, and said the emailer is the kind of customer he's "happy to lose".But activists argue those statements mean little if the company continues its commercial partnerships with police forces across the US and stands by its past treatment of non-white employee organizers "It is opportunistic of Amazon to use this moment to make empty and hypocritical statements when it is simultaneously building the backbone for many police departments across the country," said Jacinta Gonzalez of Mijente, a grassroots Latinx and Chicanx organizing group. "The company perpetuates policies and technologies that are clearly targeting and harming black and brown communities," she added.Public records released in 2018 revealed that the company had sold its facial recognition software Rekognition to police forces. Rekognition can identify faces in videos and photos, and Amazon marketing materials promoted using Rekognition in conjunction with police body cameras in real time. An experiment run by the ACLU in 2018, however, showed Rekognition incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to photos of people arrested for a crime. It disproportionately misidentified Congress members who are not white.The software, a coalition of 40 human rights groups wrote at the time the records were released, is "a powerful surveillance system" that is available to "violate rights and target communities of color". Amazon said in February 2020 it did not know how many police departments were using this technology, and the company did not respond to request for comment on Monday regarding how many police forces use this technology today – or whether those partnerships would be continued. Amazon has called for an end to 'the inequitable and brutal treatment of black people'. Photograph: AmazonActivists have also called on local officials to ban police departments from making partnerships with the Amazon subsidiary Ring after hundreds of forces partnered with the smart doorbell company to use its footage to aid surveillance.In September 2019, the US Senator Edward Markey wrote in a letter to Bezos that the partnerships "could easily create a surveillance network that places dangerous burdens on people of color and feeds racial anxieties in local communities". A report from Motherboard in 2019 revealed black and brown people are more likely to be surveilled by the Neighbors app, where Ring users can post videos and photos of "suspicious" people caught on camera.According to a map provided by Ring, the doorbell app now partners with more than 1,300 police forces across the US – a 300% increase from just 400 police forces in August 2019. Amazon did not respond to request for comment regarding whether it will continue its partnerships with local police forces. Amazon also sells web hosting services to law enforcement agencies, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Since 2018, a coalition of employees known as We Won't Build It has called on the company to halt those sales, as well as to stop selling facial recognition software to law enforcement. In a statement to the Guardian, We Won't Build It said the same demands remain. Amazon did not respond to request for comment.The company's track record with non-white employee organizers has also proven to be in conflict with its public statements regarding racial equity, said Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of employee activists at the company."Actions speak louder than words," the group said, citing Amazon's treatment of Chris Smalls, a black activist who was fired for organizing employees to protest against unsafe coronavirus-related conditions in Amazon warehouses."Amazon's words mean nothing when they are firing black employees organizing for better working conditions, when leadership planned racist smears against Chris Smalls, calling him 'not smart or articulate', when they deny our call for racial equity assessments in their business decisions and eliminating the environmental racism of its pollution, when they supply facial recognition software and Ring surveillance video access to police departments that are killing black people with impunity."Amazon is not the only company whose work with police departments have been in question since the protests following the death of George Floyd began. Last week, chat service Slack removed a blog post showing how local police forces can use the app after some Black employees criticized it. Airbnb has publicly supported Black Lives Matter but has been criticized for its role in gentrifying predominantly black neighborhoods and pushing out original residents.Amazon did not respond to request for comment or answer whether it plans to withdraw from any of its police partnerships.
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