Apple Hosted ‘Global Police Summit’ to Teach Law Enforcement How to Better Use Its Devices for Police Work
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Usually, our reports on Apple’s relationship with law enforcement involve a battle over a locked iPhone owned by a bad actor due to the two parties’ differing opinions on device privacy. However, as Forbes recently reported, Apple has taken at least one step toward improving its relationship with the cops.
According to the report, Apple hosted a “Global Police Summit” last year to help police agencies around the globe better utilize Apple products for police work. The meeting was held in October 2023 at Apple Park, just ahead of the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference. Among the 50 or so attendees were police department employees from seven countries.
According to emails obtained by Forbes via a public records request with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD), police agencies shared their “successes, innovations, and lessons learned.” For their part, Apple engineers offered presentations about Apple products and features that could benefit law enforcement, including information about “CarPlay, Crash Detection, Emergency SOS via Satellite, Vision Pro, and more.”
Law enforcement officials’ reaction to the conference was positive overall. LAPD Chief Information Officer John McMahon told Forbes that the conference was one of the most useful he’d ever attended. “I’ve never been part of an engagement that was so collaborative,” he said.
At the conference, law enforcement shared their experiences using Apple products. For example. a New Zealand police department representative shared their department’s experience creating an app for storing and accessing police data from the National Intelligence Database.
Apple is well-known for refusing to unlock iPhones when requested by law enforcement officials or build backdoors into its products to allow police to access data on devices, as it believes doing so would weaken security for its customers. While it turns down unlocking requests from police, the Cupertino firm is more than happy to sell products to any law enforcement agency with the funds to do so.
Apple keeps conferences such as the “Global Police Summit” on the down-low, as such conferences don’t exactly kibe with Apple’s “Privacy” marketing, Electronic Frontier Foundation analyst Matthew Guariglia told Forbes. “They want to get the reputation that they protect users’ data and they will do so at the expense of their relationship with law enforcement, and at the same time recognizing that creating tech for law enforcement is a multi-billion-dollar industry,” he said.
Gary Oldham, Apple’s head of worldwide strategy for public safety and emergency services until August of this year, told Forbes that he had worked to gain Apple a larger share of the public safety market share in several markets around the world. Oldham had worked with Californian police agencies to “deepen Apple tech use.”
Several police departments in California are testing the Vision Pro for use in their surveillance work. Siri comes in handy in Western Australia, where the police use Apple’s virtual assistant via CarPlay to access data and send updates about incidents.
Oldham did not tell Forbes his reasons for leaving Apple in August. Apple has not held a Global Police Summit in 2024.
