WIRED magazine wants you to know that Ring cameras are racist, so you shouldn’t buy them.

Given that I just added 3 new Ring cameras to my setup, I am about to collapse in guilt. Particularly because I live in a neighborhood that is majority Black. The trauma I am inflicting must be grave.

A few days after a Ring camera catches several teens in camera confessing to shooting and killing a Lyft driver in Washington, D.C., WIRED says they don't recommend Ring cameras because they let you easily send video to police. https://t.co/pU1QJvPCFJ

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) July 10, 2023

I can think of a number of reasons not to buy Ring cameras or any other internet-connected security system. If you are seriously privacy minded–and there are plenty of reasons to be–I would suggest steering away from them given how intrusive the government has become and its cozy relationship with Big Tech. I don’t have any Ring cameras inside my house for this reason.

But racism never struck me as a problem until I read this article, and given that WIRED’s big problem seems to be that Ring’s feature set includes some unique ways for people to become aware of and fight crime in their neighborhoods, I am pretty sure that my 100% coverage of the outside of my house with Ring cameras is on balance a good thing.

When you set up a Ring camera, you are automatically enrolled in the Neighbors service. (You can go into the Ring app’s settings and toggle off the Neighbors feed integration and notifications, but the onus is on you.) Neighbors, which is also a stand-alone app, shows you an activity feed from all nearby Ring camera owners, with posts about found dogs, stolen hoses, and a Safety Report that shows how many calls for service—violent or nonviolent—were made in the past week. It also provides an outlet for public safety agencies, like local police and fire departments, to broadcast information widely.

But it also allows Ring owners to send videos they’ve captured with their Ring video doorbell cameras and outdoor security cameras to law enforcement. This is a feature unique to Ring—even Nextdoor removed its Forward to Police feature in 2020, which allowed Nextdoor users to forward their own safety posts to local law enforcement agencies. If a crime has been committed, law enforcement should obtain a warrant to access civilian video footage.

My wife monitors Neighbors every once in a while because she likes to keep up on crime in our neighborhood. There is plenty of it to keep up with, unfortunately.

I rarely check it myself. I am aware that crime is a problem, and reminders do nothing to change my behavior. My wife will tell me if something remarkable happens, and anything else is just background noise.

But WIRED’s problem with Ring is that it works with police, and allows people to report incidents to them. While there may be a random person who sends along videos of “suspicious” people to the cops, I can assure you that they have much more pressing matters than tracking down random people walking along streets.

They don’t do enough of that and certainly are not harassing people because some overactive “Neighbor” is scared of pedestrians.

The main complaint is, of course, perpetuating racism, which is an absurd accusation. Let’s assume that a person reporting a “suspicious” person simply due to their race is sending the video to the police; has she increased the sum total of racism in the world, or simply exhibited her own preexisting racism? Clearly, it is the latter.

WIRED’s real problem is that Ring cameras might catch criminals in the act–which they do–and they fear that a disproportionate number of criminals caught on camera will be Black. The San Francisco Police Department quit publishing most mugshots due to the belief that letting people actually see criminals was racist, and that is the real problem here as well.

Yet the problem here isn’t “bias,” but the fact that a disproportionate number of criminals are Black. I don’t believe that there is some genetic predisposition that leads this to be the case–there are plenty of other explanations, and my own inclination is to believe that the reason is cultural.

But WIRED’s complaint is really aimed at reality, and like so many other Lefties they believe that hiding reality makes it go away. Look at that headline from CNN again–its very claim, that releasing mugshots creates racial bias is contradicted by the fact that the police wouldn’t take this step unless a disproportionate number of the mugshots would feature Black faces in a predominately White city.

That doesn’t reinforce bias; it reflects a sad reality.

Covering up the truth doesn’t make it go away, and liberals are determined to avoid doing what would make it go away: a better education system and a culture that reinforced the idea that getting ahead means working hard in school, getting a good job, and raising a family. Instead “urban” culture reinforces the opposite lessons, and CRT preaches that in America Blacks can’t ahead because society is arrayed against them.

Changing that culture and reforming the schools are hard to do; censoring and hiding inconvenient truths are easy.

So the Left takes the easy way out, and Blacks show up on Ring cameras far too often as perpetrators and victims of crime.

If you want it to change, the best way to do so is to fight woke culture and push for better schools.