Taser International Looking To Outfit Every US Police Department With Free Body Cameras

doitvoluntarily (77)in #business • 7 years ago

TASER International Inc. is the leading supplier of police body cams at the moment in the United States. Axon is a business unit of TASER International Inc and they provide products & services like in-car cameras, body cameras, product management, cloud computing, and other digital services.

Most of their digital services had been sold under the Axon brand and now the two are going to be "merging" in a way; Axon will now become the face of TASER International Inc.

TASR on the market is going to be changing to AAXN tomorrow.

In order to try and strengthen ties with police departments, the company is set to offer a year of free body cameras to any department who wants them. And when it comes to officer support for cameras, there is still a big divide between those who don't want them, those who do, and there will always be those who don't really care either way.

With the body cameras there are privacy concerns over who can view the footage, where it gets stored and how long it is held for. There are also concerns that officers can manually turn off the recording capabilities of the cameras. On the positive side, in many areas where they have implemented the cameras, complaints against officers are reported to have declined.

Critics of the cameras suggest that they might not be empowering the public in the way that people think and that instead these cameras might be making police departments even more powerful than they were before. Reasons for this are concerns like officers 'forgetting' to activate their cameras, breaches of protocol and failure of accountability and appropriate discipline for officers who fail to follow protocol, and worry over many states having passed legislation restricting public access to the footage.

According to the PEW Research Center, it's estimated that some 2/3 of police officers are in favor of the body cameras. There also appears to be strong support for their use with police chiefs and administrators, roughly 82 percent of that crowd shows that they favor implementation of the cameras.

In a survey from back around 2013, it was reported by police departments that roughly 75 percent of them were not using body-worn cameras. But that number has likely grown over the years as more departments have turned to using a variety of new technologies.

Aside from the free initial camera that TASER Int, now Axon, is going to provide, they'll be giving one-year of free support for the management and service of those cameras. The move of morphing from TASER International Inc into Axon, is said to signal that the company has evolved into a more full-solutions provider.