The City of Covington has posted its new contract with Axon Enterprises.
The contract relates to service agreements for police equipment, including tasers, a police drone, body-worn cameras, police car dashboard cameras and AI-assisted technology, among other equipment.
The roughly $6 million (or about $591,000 per-year split over 10 years) contract first came before the Covington Board of Commissioners in August. That contract included four combination mobile license plate readers and dash cam devices for squad cars, a new police drone, tasers, new AI-integrated tech and other equipment for the department. The city had set aside money for this tech as part of its budgeting process earlier this year.
The original contract, especially the inclusion of the automatic license plate readers, proved unpopular among city residents. Public outcry led the board to pull the contract from its initial vote date and schedule an extended public comment session at a subsequent meeting. That hours-long meeting yielded several changes to the originally proposed contract, namely:
- The complete removal of squad car license plate reader/dash cameras
- The banning of future automatic license readers mounted on poles under city jurisdiction
- Changing the term of the contract from 10 years to a single year with an option to renew it for the subsequent nine years
- A new requirement for the police department to submit a report to the city manager and board of commissioners every 30 days on the use of the technology
- Opting out of automatic software upgrades to prevent the tech from being altered without the city’s control
- Mandating keeping drafts of any police reporting that employs AI assistance so as to discern between AI-drafted reports and human-drafted reports in the public record
- Opting out of any sharing of data with Axon to train AI models
- The creation of an online transparency portal, where members of the public could follow how the new drone was used, where it went and when
Several of these caveats (although not all) were enacted via a municipal order, which you can read here.
“The City of Covington has expressly opted out of Axon’s voluntary data-sharing, customer experience, product enhancement and AI training programs,” reads a city announcement, which you can read here. “These restrictions prohibit Axon from using City data, including anonymized or aggregated data, for general product development or training shared artificial intelligence models for other customers, subject to limited exceptions necessary to provide contracted services, maintain platform security or comply with legal requirements.”
Read and download the full, signed contract below.
