At Apple’s secretive Global Police Summit at its Cupertino headquarters, cops from seven countries learned how to use a host of Apple products like the iPhone, Vision Pro and CarPlay for surveillance and policing work.
By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff
Twice in the last five years, Apple hosted behind-closed-doors conferences for police agencies from across the world, bringing cops together at the tech giant’s Cupertino headquarters to discuss the best ways to use its products, Forbes has learned.
Dubbed the Global Police Summit, the most recent event took place over three days in October 2023 at Apple Park. It was timed to precede the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) conference in San Diego that year, according to emails obtained by Forbes via a public records request with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD).
There’s a widespread perception that Apple has a combative relationship with law enforcement after the company refused to help the FBI hack into the iPhone of the shooter in the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attacks. But since then, it has ramped up collaboration with police through the conference and other meetings with agencies at both Cupertino HQ and its Elk Grove campus, as well as a variety of previously unreported projects helping cops use iPhones, Macs, Apple Vision Pro and CarPlay, the emails show. Most of these projects have not been announced publicly.
Apple declined to comment.
“I’ve been in law enforcement now for almost 36 years. I’ve never been part of an engagement that was so collaborative.”
That Apple has kept its work with cops largely under wraps indicates the company is aware that providing tech for police surveillance operations is inherently at odds with its pro-privacy marketing, said Electronic Frontier Foundation senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia. “These companies want to have their cake and eat it,” 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.” The U.S. spends an estimated $100 billion on policing every year.
Gary Oldham, who led Apple’s worldwide strategy for public safety and emergency services until August, and ran the Global Police Summit, told Forbes the first event ran in 2019, with subsequent events canceled due to Covid until the 2023 conference. As many as 50 police department employees from seven countries, from Australia to Switzerland, attended the events, where Apple held listening sessions with its engineers to discuss developing apps on the company’s various platforms, and cops gave presentations on using Apple technology.
“Topics this year will include customer agencies sharing their successes, innovations, and lessons learned; presentations by Apple on new products and features of benefit to law enforcement that are planned to include CarPlay, Crash Detection, Emergency SOS via Satellite, Vision Pro and more,” read an Apple email to attendees about the 2023 event.
John McMahon, deputy chief and chief information officer at the LAPD, said the event was one of the most useful police conferences he’d ever attended, as it showed him how agencies from across the world “were so far ahead of American policing and the use of technology and its capitalization of mobilization.”
“I’ve been in law enforcement now for almost 36 years. I’ve never been part of an engagement that was so collaborative with my colleagues from throughout the world,” McMahon, who also gave a presentation at the event last year, told Forbes.
Among the more memorable talks during the 2023 event was from the New Zealand Police, which outlined how it worked with a local developer to build an iOS app for storing and accessing police information, Oldham said. Called OnDuty, the app is connected to the National Intelligence Database and makes it easy to search data including locations, license plate numbers and individual criminal histories. Other iOS apps used by NZ Police provide situational awareness, showing cops if any persons of interest are known to frequent an area or if it’s a place where crime has previously occurred, according to presentation slides provided to Forbes by NZ Police.
The presentation from the New Zealand Police detailed several initiatives using Apple technology.
New Zealand Police
Oldham, a former police officer, said he’d grown Apple’s public safety market share from around 10% to 70% in Apple’s targeted markets around the world. As he noted on his public LinkedIn page: “In a number of countries, I grew our share to 80% or better and achieved 100% public safety market share in four countries.”
Apple’s collaboration with police appears to have been closest with nearby agencies in California, according to the emails obtained from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. In one email, Oldham said the OCSD, the LAPD, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) were all “actively doing great things on our platform.” Between them, the agencies have rolled out and tested apps for a variety of Apple products, from Vision Pro to iPhones and Macs, whether for access to surveillance data or for basic communications. Oldham was seeking to set up meetings with other Southern Californian agencies to deepen Apple tech use across the state’s police forces.
As Forbes previously reported, Orange County Sheriff’s Department has tested out Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset to create a virtual version of its surveillance data hub, which the agency calls its Real Time Operations Center. The emails show that the agency was interested in using a Vision Pro back in March this year, after it learned the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Emergency Operations Bureau had been using the VR tool. An Instagram post from September later showed the LASD using Vision Pro devices to view maps and incident management tools to respond to emergencies.
Apple staffer Ritz Sherman, who has been working on the company’s government projects since the late 1980s, connected the two agencies, according to the emails. Orange County later confirmed to Forbes it had purchased a Vision Pro to trial the tech. The LAPD is also about to start trialing Vision Pros for its surveillance work, according to public records. “A room of display monitors and a command post can all be done on a single pair of goggles,” said deputy chief McMahon.
“The Apple ecosystem all works very nicely together.”
Cops have also shown an interest in Apple’s CarPlay, which turns a car’s entertainment dashboard into an iOS screen. The emails detail the LAPD, Orange County and LASD organizing a meeting with execs from car manufacturer Ford at the IACP event in October to discuss the use of CarPlay. Orange County police CIO Dave Fontneau previously told Forbes he was considering switching out all cop car laptops with Apple CarPlay in police vehicles’ dashboards. “The Apple ecosystem all works very nicely together,” he said. Oldham said that U.S. agencies were interested in emulating a deployment of CarPlay by the Western Australia Police Force, where cops are using Siri to access police data and update their department with incident updates. McMahon said there was a safety aspect too, as the metal fabrications that keep in-car laptops in place have previously injured and killed police officers in traffic collisions.
But Apple’s approach to courting police departments may be shifting. In July 2024, Oldham told police customers that he’d not been able to secure budget for the 2024 Global Police Summit, but hoped it would become a biennial event. A week later, he emailed Californian police departments again to say he was leaving the company, without providing a reason why. Oldham declined to comment on why he left the company.
Police are now hoping Apple reconsiders hosting the summit. “I’m extremely disappointed that, for whatever reason, that it wasn’t able to happen again this year,” said McMahon.
Even if Apple permanently cancels the event, cops remain keen to up their use of the company’s tools. On being told of this year’s canceled conference, Orange County’s Fontneau wrote to Oldham, “This was one of the key events we all look forward to each year,” before quipping, “I guess we will go to the Android event this year.”
