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Aurora, Ill., Approves Police Body Cam Pilot Program

Aurora will now have a pilot program of between 30 and 45 days to find out which of two vendors it will award a contract of more than $2 million to for the body cameras for the police department.

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(TNS) — Aurora, Ill., will have a pilot program of between 30 and 45 days to find out which of two vendors it will award a contract of more than $2 million to for body cameras for police officers.

The Aurora City Council this week approved the pilot program, which will test Axon Enterprises Inc. against Motorola, also known as WatchGuard, the final two vendors left standing after Aurora looked at more than 30 bidders, which were whittled down to a final five that received requests for proposals from the city.

The Axon bid is for about $2.15 million, and the Motorola bid is for about $2.06 million. Both bidders will conduct the pilot program at no cost to the city.

"One of the reasons we're doing the pilot is, this is an extra step," said Martin Lyons, the city's chief financial officer. "Through this pilot program we will pick one or the other to offer a contract to."

Lyons pointed out that the two bidders were the "higher-priced vendors," but that because this was done through the request for proposals process, price was worth only 20% in scoring.

"The rest was on ability to perform," he said.

Members of the Aurora Police Department; the Aurora Fire Department; the city's Information Technology Department; Marketplace.City, the city's purchasing consultant; and other city officials met on multiple occasions to "go through the proposals in depth," Lyons said. He said both vendors offered a five-year program, and not an "install and walk away" situation.

The city had hired as consultants the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physical Laboratory, which pointed out that considerations for buying police body cams go beyond just the equipment — it includes how the equipment will mesh with the city's computer systems, as well as data storage and the ability to redact things.

The latter is a costly and time-consuming element, Lyons said. Footage from body cameras is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which mandates that public records be made available to the public upon request. Because the police recordings have the potential to invade privacy, there are general provisions for archiving, retrieving and redacting footage before the recordings can be made public following a proper request.

The department anticipates an estimated 16,000 hours of body cam footage will be captured by police officers a month, or 192,000 hours a year. During the pilot program, in addition to seeing how the equipment works, the city will evaluate what kind of staffing would be needed for dealing with that amount of footage.

"This is going to be a technical installation, but also a lot of policy is going to come out of it," Lyons said.

Originally, the city and its consultants estimated the body cameras would have a total cost of $5 million over five years. With the two vendors chosen for the pilot, Lyons said the five-year cost has been revised to be less than half that amount.

The city is looking at paying for the purchase over five years using a combination of 911 funds and general fund money.

Ald. Edward Bugg, 9th Ward, asked if delaying the body camera program by a year would help budgetary concerns for 2021 brought about by the coronavirus pandemic.

"Delaying by one year will not impact next year's budget," Lyons said.

Ald. Sherman Jenkins, at large, asked if either system could guarantee that individual officers could not turn off the cameras, or that they would not stop working for any reason.

"I think the citizens want to be assured we don't have a situation where someone turned off the cameras, or they didn't work," he said.

Michael Pegues, the city's chief information technology officer, said one of the vendors does offer a feature where things can be recorded "after the fact," meaning that there still would be recordings made if the cameras were off.

During listening sessions with the public about police procedures held during the summer, people repeatedly said police officers should have body cameras. People said they would assure more transparency and accountability in the police department.

But one member of the public who spoke to the council this week said money spent on body cameras was too much to put into the police department. He said body cameras do not necessarily force accountability.

"I would rather see you put more into prevention," said Levi Herrera.

(c)2020 The Beacon-News (Aurora, Ill.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.