No vote on Covington Axon contract, city to host public forum

A $6 million, 10-year contract with Axon Enterprises stalled at the Covington Board of Commissioners meeting this week.

In a two-hour meeting marked by public outcry and confusion over parliamentary procedure, the commissioners finally agreed to hold a public forum on the topic sometime within the next 30 days. An exact date for the forum has not yet been set.

Worth just over $6 million, the new 10-year contract includes mobile license plate reader devices for squad cars, a new police drone, tasers, new AI-integrated tech, and other equipment for the department. The money to purchase this tech had been set aside as part of the city budgeting process earlier this year. The city’s current five-year contract with Axon will conclude on Sept. 30. 

Axon is known mostly for making police body cams, but they also make other technology marketed to police departments, including fixed-angle automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, similar to those produced by Flock Safety, a company that has been the subject of much public backlash lately. The City of Covington does not have a contract with Flock Safety, but the new Axon contract includes vehicle-mounted ALPRs, which capture and store data for 90 days.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of what’s in the Axon contract; this list is not exhaustive:

• 117 body cams
• 117 tasers
• 117 AI program subscriptions, including transcription, translation and software assistants
• Interview equipment, including cameras, mics and sensors
• A single drone

You can read the full contract here.

Several residents spoke out against the contract, for varying reasons, ranging from concerns about cloud-based data security, the potential for the drone to be abused for mass surveillance, the length and cost of the contract, and whether spending money on the new contract was even necessary when simpler technological procedures that accomplished the same thing were already available. Others expressed worry about the new contract’s inclusion of AI-assisted software, worrying that it might lead to inaccurate reporting or inadmissible evidence in court.

Police Chief Brian Wietholter addressed the audience and commissioners after the public comments. He read from a written statement, which you can read here, that attempted to defend the contract and allay some of the public’s concerns. One of the key things Wietholter emphasized was that the new contract, about half of its monetary worth, was dedicated to simply maintaining the services the police already employed.

“The bulk of the contract relates to the continued expansion and improvement of the city’s bodyworn camera and evidence-management systems, which document police interactions, preserve evidence and support transparency and accountability,” Wietholter said. “With that comes ever-increasing technology costs, simply to maintain the equipment and services that we currently utilize.”

The commissioners then peppered him with questions about the details: How long was data stored? What counts as a legitimate investigative use of the technology? How fast could the drone fly, and could it conceivably be used to surveil people? What was the auditing process? Could the contract be canceled before the 10-year mark?

Finally, the commissioners pulled the contract from the meeting’s consent agenda, forcing them to consider it as a single legislative item rather than one item on a list.

When it came time to vote, Mayor Ron Washington presented a proposal that would have amended the contract to establish more detailed auditing, security, access, reporting, and privacy procedures as a compromise between the police’s desire for more efficient tools and the public’s concerns about privacy and surveillance. Many of these proposals were elaborations or stricter augmentations to basic policies already in place, but it would have created more exacting procedures on what the police could and couldn’t do with the tech.

“The intent of this motion is to provide the Covington Police Department with appropriate technology necessary to protect the public and effectively perform its duties while establishing clear safeguards governing privacy, surveillance, access, data sharing, retention, transparency and accountability,” Washington said.

You can read the mayor’s full proposal here.

Commissioner Tim Acri then motioned to table the matter for two weeks until the next legislative meeting on Sept. 8.

“I would respectfully request that we table this to give our public a little bit more time to ask us questions and move this to our next legislative meeting,” said Acri.

Commissioner James Toebbe seconded the motion, which passed 3-2, with Commissioner Tim Downing and Mayor Washington voting “no.”

This motion launched a veritable symposium on parliamentary procedure in which the commissioners and the city solicitor debated the exactitude of Acri’s meaning, whether his motion to table was for the whole contract or just the mayor’s proposal, if the table was valid for two weeks or longer, and, depending on whatever the answer those questions were, how to get to a vote to actually table the contract.

Finally, City Manager Sharimil Reddy asked, “can we get five minutes to just look at the rules and come back?”

The commissioners then recessed the meeting for five minutes to let the city staff members figure out what the possibilities were.

The mayor gaveled everyone back in. More debate ensued.

“I still don’t know exactly what we’re doing here,” said Acri.

Finally, City Solicitor Frank Schultz recommended going ahead and voting on the contract that night, allowing for public feedback after, and then amending the contract accordingly through subsequent legislative action. Vice Mayor Shannon Smith made that motion, but it died when no one else took up a second.

Thus, no vote on the actual contract took place.

The mayor brought up the idea of a public forum at the end of the meeting.

“We’re asking the city manager to look into a date, approximately 30 days out or so, to come back with a suggestion on a public forum for this,” said Washington.

The city will announce an exact date for the forum in the coming days.