Tuesday, the Fort Worth Police Department will ask city council members to consider a new contract with AXON, the company responsible for their body cameras, dash cameras, and Tasers.
The department’s largest contract with AXON is set to expire at the end of the year.
“There are some proposed upgrades to the cameras that we currently have in our vehicles and there is some added functionality that will be increased in the equipment that we currently have,” Lt. Vincent Brown said. “We’re going to get new kinds of cameras in our cars and there’s going to be some new technology available for us, but that is going to take a while to come online.”
The AXON contracts total approximately $3.6 million.
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Brown explained their presentation to council members would bring their contracts together.
“One of the things that really helps out the police department is that these are integrated with one another,” Brown said. “You can imagine you have a big incident somewhere and you have 10 officers, in six vehicles. All these different things and everything has all this data and this data is so big and there is so much of it. This links it all together.”
The upgraded equipment would likely come with changes to protocols.
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“There will be some in the future. There are going to be new cameras with new abilities that go with the cars and we will get those almost immediately,” Brown said. “If the city council approves the contract, those will immediately be shipped out and we will start installing those at some point. With this new technology that comes with that, we will have to make adjustments to address that.”
