CEO Rick Smith says the Scottsdale-based company is changing its name to Axon, in response to the growing demand for its recording equipment.

Taser International Inc. announced Wednesday that it is offering a free body camera to every police officer in the country for a year, making a bold bet that law-enforcement agencies will choose the company’s products if given a trial.

The Scottsdale-based company will provide the software and hardware needed to use the cameras for a year to any department not already involved in a public bidding process for body cameras. The company is encouraging its competitors to make the same offer.

Taser, which was founded in 1993, is also officially changing its name to Axon, the name of its signature body camera. The change reflects the variety of technology it offers, which has grown beyond the original stun guns for which it is named, officials said.

The offer includes the use of an “Axon Body 2” camera and license to use the company’s evidence-collecting website, which can store and organize video from multiple officers and other information pertinent to a criminal case.

The Axon Body 2 chest-mounted cameras retail for about $400, and licensing for the website and data storage can cost $15 to $90 a month depending on the features a police department wants to activate, the company said.

The company earns more revenue in the long run from managing the substantial quantities of data collected by the cameras than from the hardware itself.

“The offer is legitimate,” company founder and CEO Rick Smith said. “There is zero cost. Agencies can try this with all their officers and not pay us a dime.”

Body-camera sales grow across country

Smith said the company’s offer will allow officers to do their job more effectively and reduce the amount of time officers spend filling out police reports. The cameras collect an “impartial” record, he said.

The company’s camera line was launched in 2008, but interest spiked after a series of high-profile police shootings, including the death of an unarmed man in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 and fatal shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota in 2016. Those events were followed by protests and then shootings of police officers, including two killed in New York in 2014 and five in Dallas in 2016, in which the gunmen said they acted in retaliation for police shootings.

“Tension between the police and the public is at historic levels,” Smith said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my lifetime …  In that environment of distrust, body cameras make a huge difference. Police officers have proof of what they were facing when they did what they did.”

Axon, which reported a profit of $17.3 million last year, still sells more Taser weapons than body cameras, but body-camera sales are growing much faster. The company reported it sold about $203 million in Taser weapons last year, up 25 percent from 2015. It sold about $66 million in Axon equipment and software licenses in 2016, up 85 percent year over year.

Axon: Test our equipment in the field

Axon’s sales team has been aggressively marketing its body-worn camera technology and its digital-storage systems to local governments, often in fierce competition with other providers.

Its new marketing tactic looks to sidestep the traditional procurement process in many cities, where major buying decisions are made by city finance departments.

Axon executives say using their devices in field trials is the best way to judge how well the system works.

Smith said his company wins “nearly 100 percent” of public bidding processes where officers actually test the equipment.

He expressed frustration that bidding procedures often don’t put the best equipment in officers’ hands.

“Everyone who sells to the government has lobbyists and procurement specialists,” he said. “Police officers will tell you the technology they have at work is awful and has a horrible user experience. The way companies win government contracts has been who can navigate the purchasing bureaucracy. We think that is something that has to change.”

“We’ve got to help our customers get to field trials so that they are actually deploying our products in the field,” Smith told investors during a February teleconference. “That is where the game changes … You can’t buy sophisticated technology with procurement processes that were built 20 to 30 years ago for buying belts and holsters and that sort of stuff.”

Controversy in Phoenix bidding process

Wednesday’s offer is an expanded version of one company officials made earlier this year to big-city police departments.

In Phoenix, the proposal was not well received. Taser already had been disqualified from a bid process after its employees improperly reached out to city officials. The offer letter for free cameras, which was sent in January to Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams, was seen by Phoenix officials as an unethical attempt to circumvent the process.

“The offer, if accepted, would undermine our procurement system and seriously damage its credibility,” Phoenix City Attorney Brad Holm responded to Taser in a February letter. “Please refrain from submitting anything similar to the offer again.”

At least one of Taser’s body-camera rivals sued the company earlier this year as a result of its aggressive lobbying.

VieVu, the company that outfits Phoenix officers with body cameras for a pilot program, had won a lucrative contract with the city late last year. That deal was scrapped, and city officials said a rebid was planned to allow Williams, the new Phoenix police chief, a say in the process. Attorneys for VieVu say Taser is to blame, alleging improper communications between Taser and Phoenix officials.

Taser filed a countersuit, claiming that VieVu had won the initial bid based on false advertising claims.

MORE: Rival sues Taser over loss of Phoenix police body-cam contract

MORE: Taser sues body-camera rival VieVu over Phoenix bidding process, citing quality concerns

Dominant provider in region’s market

Axon’s body cameras have a stronghold in the Phoenix area, with the company’s client roster including Mesa, Scottsdale, Chandler, Glendale, Peoria, Tempe and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

Axon also has high-profile customers across the country. The company reports that it already serves 36 of the 68 largest police departments in the nation with cameras, including the Los Angeles Police Department, its largest domestic customer.

In October, the company announced 22,000 members of the London Metropolitan Police would use its body cameras after a trial period, making the city in Great Britain the largest Axon customer.

Last month, the company announced a 90-day trial of the cameras for the Fredericton Police Force in Canada.

Joaquin Enriquez, a public-information officer at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, said deputies’ experiences with the product have been generally positive.

“Overall feedback is that video is good, the system is user-friendly and for the most part the audio is really good as well,” he said.

Enriquez said the agency uses another, older model of the camera, and said one issue that arose was that sometimes the head-cam gear would fall off during pursuits and fights. But he added that the company was working to fix those issues, and that the newer version was easier to handle.

Police reports of the future: Mostly video?

Axon officials predict case files increasingly will move away from handwritten or typed reports to collections of video that can be annotated, shared with prosecuting attorneys and redacted for privacy concerns.

Axon recently acquired artificial-intelligence developers to help facilitate the move to video records that can easily be managed.

Smith said the process will save officers time, allowing them to spend more of their workday in the community.

“All this time police are spending writing reports is fairly useless,” he said. “When you have a critical case, nobody believes the report anyways.”

What law-enforcement agencies will get

Departments that take Axon’s offer can choose either to return the equipment or purchase the cameras at the end of the trial. If they return the equipment, all of the evidence collected with the systems will remain with the police departments.

The cameras being offered in the deal record in high definition, can transmit video via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, have 12-hour batteries and can store 70 hours of video.

They are made in the north Scottsdale factory where the company is headquartered.

Axon had 132,000 users on its Evidence.com website at the end of 2016. The company estimates there are 600,000 patrol officers in the U.S. that could use its technology and another 400,000 patrol vehicles that could be equipped with its cameras.

The company estimates another 1 million potential international users in top global markets.

Smith said departments that already are customers can participate in the offer by expanding the number of officers equipped with the cameras or by discounts on their service contracts.

“We never want anyone to feel like they made a mistake by moving quickly,” he said.

Company officials are unsure how many departments in the U.S. will take the offer, but said they are prepared to ramp up production to meet any level of demand. In February, the company reported a backlog of about 9,000 of its Flex head-mounted cameras that record an eye-level perspective of police interactions.

The backlog was expected to be eliminated in the second quarter of this year.

Smith said the company has built up an inventory of the chest-mounted cameras and has expanded production capacity and staffing to handle significant demand if it arises.

“We can do tens of thousands of cameras in the next 90 days,” he said.

Axon offer

Source: Axon

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