NYPD passes on offer of ‘free’ body gear

A COMPANY that makes stun guns offered free body cameras Wednesday to every police department in the country, but the NYPD won’t be a taker.

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Axon, formerly known as Taser International, said it is launching a new program to provide body cameras, support equipment and service to the nation’s police departments for free for one year. After that, departments would have to pay to maintain use of the cameras.

“We are going ‘all in’ to empower police officers to more safely and effectively do their jobs and drive important social change by making body cameras available to every officer in America,” said Rick Smith, Founder and CEO of Axon.

A company spokeswoman said departments are free to drop the service at the end of the free trial.

A NYPD official said the department declined a similar offer from the company during the process of selecting a body camera vendor.

“It would be inappropriate according to rules governing the procurement process to accept such an offer,” the official said.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association did not return a phone call.

Nancy La Vigne, director of the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., said the bulk of the profits in body cameras come from storage fees for the data.

“This is part of (Axon’s) business model,” she said. “It’s sort of like the printer industry, where all the money was in the toner and the cartridges.”

The NYPD has chosen Vievu over Axon for a $6.4 million contract to supply 1,000 cameras as part of a court-ordered pilot program.

“Axon’s publicity stunt is at best unethical and at worst illegal,” Vievu said in a statement. “These so-called ‘free cameras’ come with significant internal implementation costs for law enforcement agencies that will be left with unusable raw data at the end of a year-long trial period.”

The city Department of Investigation has been examining the Vievu contract since last year, sources said. In February, Mayor de Blasio asserted that every cop in the city would have body cameras by 2019.

He’s vowed to go ahead with the deal in spite of objections from city Controller Scott Stringer, who said he needed more info to approve the contract.

On Wednesday, Axon cited a Pew Research poll of cops that concluded their jobs are harder than ever.

“The faster we can get this technology to officers who need it, the faster we can begin that process and free up officers’ time to get back into the community, building better relationships with the people they serve,” Smith said.