REQUIRING POLICE BODY CAMS: Motorola and Axon Fight To Corner Lucrative Body-Worn Camera Market

"Caught on Cam" for the time being has faded-out of the intense national conversation after the prosecution for the police killing of George Floyd when evidence was based on the recorded now infamous live video images captured by a civilian on her own personal cellphone.

Derek Chauvin, the former cop who was convicted of Floyd’s murder, was wearing a body camera at the beginning of the incident, but it allegedly fell off and slid under the squad car before he knelt on Floyd’s neck.

His camera was made by a company called Axon — formerly known as Taser — the largest provider of body cameras in the United States. 

Here are some selected excerpts taken from The First Look Institute as reported back in December of last year

 

Two Companies Fight to Corner the Police Body Camera Market

Axon and Motorola lobbied Congress to promote police tech in reform bills. Their devices may not change policing — yet business is booming.

Akela Lacy

The Intercept

 

". . .Earning more than $680 million in revenue last year, Axon currently dominates the domestic body camera market. Its main competitor is Motorola, which claims to sell more affordable cameras that fit more securely to uniforms and can upload video automatically to systems that manage police evidence.

The two companies are angling for control of the lucrative police-worn body camera market, which has nearly doubled in the past five years and is projected to keep growing.

The cameras are a favorite tool of legislators who want to respond to police violence but don’t support proposals to reduce police presence, and their enthusiasm helped the global industry balloon to $1.2 billion in 2020, with projected growth to $7 billion by 2026. . .

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Readers of this blog might note that last week, there was a presentation by Travis Cartwright in front of the Mesa City Council in Arizona to approve a proposal to fund a private cellular network partnering with Motorola for part of the Mesa Public System.

The city has other contracts with Motorola for radios and ruggedized electronics.

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But for industry skeptics, at issue is whether policy changes that continue to add money to police budgets for such technologies can decrease police use of force — or change policing at all. Body cameras “don’t produce accountability or transparency,” said Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice campaigns at Color of Change, namely because they don’t reduce the number of civilian interactions with police. “What [such technology] has produced is a ton of investment, more and more money being spent on police departments.”

. . .A 2019 review of 70 available studies on the impacts of body-worn cameras on police behavior found that though “officers and citizens are generally supportive of BWC use, BWCs have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens’ views of police.”

> Some police agencies have mandatory recording or reporting policies, but others don’t.

Those factors make it difficult to quantify how effective the technology is overall. According to Seth Stoughton, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies the effectiveness of body cameras, “It was always unrealistic to expect a piece of equipment to change, fundamentally, police culture.”

 

[...] The prominence of body cameras in the national conversation comes amid a litany of lobbying by the two companies.

> One of the companies lobbying last year for the bill’s promotion of body cameras was Axon, which at the time already had a customer relationship with 17,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies.

According to its 2020 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company had sales representatives assigned to the 1,200 biggest agencies, which account for between 70 and 80 percent of U.S. law enforcement officers. The company claims that its “mission is to protect life” and that its body cameras allow cops “to work effectively and transparently.”

It says that its Taser weapons “protect life without taking it,” though a Fatal Encounters dataset showed that more than 500 people have died after being Tased since 2010.

Axon acquired what was then its largest competitor in 2018, becoming the main supplier of cameras to police departments in New York City, Phoenix, and Miami.

Though the Federal Exchange Commission challenged the acquisition last year — in a case that’s still pending —

> Axon’s most formidable rising competitor is Motorola, which in 2019 acquired two companies that make body cameras in the U.S. and in Europe. The company recently announced contracts in Tennessee, Illinois, France, and the United Kingdom. Its fastest growing sectors are video and security analytics, which brought in $927 million in revenue last year.

 

Numerous city councils across the country approved additional police funding for body cameras last year, as was the case several years ago after protest movements in Ferguson, Missouri. And increased investment in police technologies can provide a boon not only for body camera companies like Axon and Motorola, but also for software, artificial intelligence, and other companies that provide technologies like cloud storage and facial recognition.

“Video is data intensive,” Fredericks wrote in a September article for Police Chief magazine. “Police agencies expect to produce more visual data than any other form of computer information, so much information that outsourcing storage and management to a third party is often the only viable and cost-effective strategy for agencies currently drowning in video data. For example, Axon, one provider of cloud-based storage solutions, reports it is managing and storing more than 120,000 TB of video data from 14,000 police agencies.”

Correction: December 10, 2021

The piece has been updated to clarify that the Fatal Encounters dataset does not claim Tasers are the sole cause of death in the cases they analyzed. The dataset shows more than 500 people died “soon after” being Tased since 2010.

Reference: https://theintercept.com/2021/12/08/police-reform-body-cameras-axon-motorola/