‘Slow down,’ urges citizen, recalling Flock controversy
By Bob Seidenberg
Members of the city’s Finance & Budget Committee generally agreed Tuesday that a proposed new contract with Axon, the company that provides the Evanston Police Department with body cameras and Tasers, runs too long and costs too much money.
But committee members also conceded that the city lacks the time and the wherewithal at this point to fashion alternatives that match up with Axon, recognized as the most widely used supplier of body worn cameras and public safety technology.
After spending nearly an hour and half discussing the possibilities, committee members unanimously agreed to send the issue on to the council with a neutral recommendation.
The issue next goes to the council for review and action at its December meeting.
Evanston entered its first contract with Axon, in 2017, outfitting 120 officers with body worn cameras and Tasers, the first department in the area to DOdo so, said Deputy Chief of Police Jody Wright, and Louis Gergits, Manager of Budget and Finance, in a memo and presentation to the committee.
In 2018, the contract expanded to include all sworn personnel, providing body-worn cameras and Tasers, as well as access to Axon’s cloud based storage platform, they said.
In 2022, the city renewed its contract early, this time entering a five-year $2.5 million agreement with the company and adding new features, such as the Redaction Assistant, automating video redaction on the many Freedom of Information requests the department receives, Wright said.
With that agreement set to expire at the end of 2026, EPD staff have been discussing a new contract with Axon, police officials said.
At Tuesday night’s meeting, officials submitted a proposed seven-year proposed that, if started before this year closes out, WOULD carry a $5.9 million basic cost, but $6 million if not renewed until next year.
Finance & Budget committee members reviewed the proposal under their policy – established after the city’s unexpected $2.6 million purchase of the former Little Beans Cafe in south Evanston in June 2024 – to be repurposed into a recreation center, seeking review power of the city’s larger purchases.
Under the seven year contract under consideration, costs would climb increase approximately $850,000 per year. The current Axon contract averages roughly $500,000 per year, police officials pointed out.
“That’s a 70 percent increase,” observed committee member David Livingston. “Are we getting anything incremental or is it that the market has gone up?”
“The short answer is that’s just the market rate, how it’s going up,” replied Wright.
He explained that when police examined what some neighboring law enforcement agencies are paying for the service, “there are some agencies in this area who are paying slightly more than that, slightly less than that. It all depends on how many members they intend to outfit, so the staffing or the allocation of their department, and how many officers they are outfitting with the technology, as well as the different types of technology, the different types of services that those agencies are buying,” he said.
Therese McGuire, a new member of the committee and a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, noted that the contract calls for a 35% increase between fiscal year 2026 and fiscal year 2027. Is that “because we added so much more into the package?” she asked.
Wright said the package is improved. “We currently don’t have Taser 10’s (which Axon touts as harkening “a new era in less lethal technology”). He said the same goes for new drone software and some which enhance community engagement.
“Are all of those services required by law, or is there only one component statutorily?” McGuire followed up.
Wright said that body-worn cameras is the one component required by statute.
Cost warrants looking at other alternatives: Chow
Candance Chow, another new member of the committee, asked whether the city has a standard Request for Proposal with the city not going out to the wider market on the service currently provided by Axon.
“I know Axon has been in some lawsuits,” accusing the company “of pricing or monopolistic behavior, and so I realize there’s very few competitors,” she said, “but it feels like this kind of increase warrants us to be looking at, service by service, what other alternatives there are, and then what the cost of that could be in terms of data transfer You know, there’s other obviously significant time and effort costs, but have you considered that as part of the process?” she asked police officials.
The Axon ecosystem
Wright said the department has explored other service, using different software for the department’s Internal Affairs unit at one point.
The department, though, switched back to Axon at the beginning of the year, he said.
“What’s unique about Axon is their ecosystem — everything is integrated together, so everything works in harmony with each other,” he said. For instance, if examining body worn video from a crime scene, “ I can look at that video and I can tell you who is on the scene…just from looking at the video, because it’s smart (using ‘smart’ technology.)
“When I want to save the video to a case file,” he continued, “I can capture all the video from all the officers on scene, as well as Taser fire logs, I can capture the not just the body worn camera video that may have captured an incident, but also the fleet cameras as well. So all of those systems work together. If we were to go out and look at that for each service individually … if that competitor doesn’t integrate with our Tasers, it makes the job that much harder for the supervisors and us as a department.’”
Kelly: the city needs a Technology Committee
Councilmember Clare Kelly, 1st, noted the big price increase as a concern, as well as the length of the contract with technology changing.
“I guess I’m also concerned in the age that we’re in right now, with the issues we’re having with (ICE) detentions and sharing of information,” she said. “I feel like it would be nice if we had a technology committee here to just review everything.”
She also said that “value engineering” in the contract is needed, drawing up an itemized list “of what we needed to have, what we absolutely have to have, versus what is optional, to be able to sort of value engineer this in terms of reducing potential costs.”
Little fluff
Responding, Wright said that “mostly everything in that contract are items that we need,” and that there’s “not much fluff.”
“We definitely need and have to have the body-worn cameras. The Taser 10 is a less lethal option; the evidence management — we have to have redaction standards — all of those are important components to police operations that we need to have.”
The department used Sourcewell, a government agency which conducts a competitive bidding process on behalf of its members, he pointed out.
Summarizing, councilmember Jonathan Nieuwsma, 4th, noted that body cameras “are required by law. We have to use them. The non-lethal alternatives meet that requirement, so we have been fulfilling our legal obligations for those two items, along with a suite of related product, products and services through Axon which has provided a quality product that EPD is comfortable with.”
“They’re the biggest game in town by far, right? Yeah, so our alternatives, if we were going to try and find another manufacturer, another provider, are limited, or at least non-existent,” he said. He asked about the possibility of pursuing a piecemeal approach to provide the service.
Responding, Wright said, “if we wanted to take everything that they’re giving us and get it to somebody else, we could piecemeal it a la carte.
“I think the major disadvantage in doing that would be essentially operational efficiency.”
He used the Taser as an example. “You know, you have an option, you know, to deescalate a potential serious use of force, just by the display of the Taser in a lawful way.”
‘One summons, one unredacted video’ could wipe out savings: Suffredin
Council member Thomas Suffredin, 6th, noted Axon’s use by most departments as an advantage.
As a result, he said, “lateral transfers coming into the department don’t have to learn anything new if we use the same equipment that the previous department did.
“So not having to train new officers on new equipment is one cost savings.”
He said there’s also the potential legal costs without a system like Axon’s, noting the city’s law department wasn’t present to explain further.
With the body cameras, for example, “in addition to making us comply with state law, they reduce potential liability to the city in a lot of instances. This isn’t the place to cheap out. I understand the desire to cobble together an ala carte option and come up with some sort of cost savings, but whatever savings we really realize would be wiped out, potentially by one summons, one unredacted video being released.”
“It seems like we’re kind of discounting the risk mitigation to the city that familiar proven technology,” can provide, he said.
Need for a system where we all talk to each other: Rodgers
Councilmember Matt Rodgers, chairing the meeting, noted the importance of having “a whole ecosystem” under the current contract.
In his own case, he pointed to his watch, laptop and phone, “which all talk to each other.”
“I don’t have to jump back and forth between PC and Apple or some other brand of something, and that saves me a lot of time in what I do,” he said. “I’ve also seen some departments in the city that use three different versions of software, and you have to sign in three different places in order to get those pieces of information, and the man hours that are wasted in doing that make that a very inefficient system. So I think it’s very important that we -I think that’s, that’s a very big, important selling point to me, is that you’re working within one ecosystem, instead of cobbling things together out of different systems.”
Slow down, urges citizen
David Sutherland, the only non-committee person to speak to the issue, said the loss of privacy has to be reckoned with too. He cited the controversy with private Flock stationary license plate cameras that eventually led to a cease and desist order from the city that the cameras be taken down.
He maintained that “there’s a ton of surveillance weapons” on the Axon list of items to be purchased under a new contract.
‘We had 19 ALPRs (Automated License Plate Readers) under Flock, 19 cameras of just taking our data and giving it to the feds. And now you’re asking for 45 — you’re doubling down on the ALPRs and you’re putting them on vehicles so they’re mobile,” he said.
Further, Axon has “a whole suite of technologies that can share this information. It can be tied together — it could be uses to the detriment. This data can be centralized, and with access and leaks and it will be breached. We saw that with Flock.”
He noted that Axon’s contract calls for a $54,000 drone.
“I’m not sure if you guys know the impact of this huge contract, $6 million. That’s way too much. Slow down.”
Nieuwsma’s original motion called for the committee to recommend approve the direction set out in the Axon contract.
“It would then be subject to debate and discussion at the council level, which would be the appropriate venue to weigh in on this policy,” he said.
Citing issues the city has had in the past with such technology, Kelly asked that the proposal be moved to the council without a vote recommending in favor.
Committee members agreed, deciding not to take a position and voting to move the issue to the council with a neutral recommendation.
Tuesday’s discussion amounted to “an hour and twenty seven minute scrimmage,” said Suffredin, speaking to the need for a conclusive decision.