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
The city had hired as consultants the
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,
"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.
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