In a blog post from Forbes published yesterday we learned that Apple held a " Global Police Summit" at Apple Park back in October 2023.

Apple has kept its work with cops largely under wraps. 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. He added that “These companies want to have their cake and eat it too." Apple recognizes 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 Sweden, 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 at the Apple event included 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,”

(Click on image to Greatly Enlarge)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yet a week later, Oldman emailed the 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. For more, read the full Forbes report.

Below is a 15 minute video titled " Inside Apple’s Secretive Global Police Summit." The Forbes reporter Brittany lewis hosted the interview with Forbes Senior Writer Tom Brewster.