San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Bids still up in air on body cams
Commissioners could amend process
Nearly three months after Bexar County commissioners opted for a competitive bidding process to resolve Sheriff Javier Salazar’s request to contract with body camera provider Axon Enterprise, the county’s purchasing agent said Friday that Bexar officials might amend the bid solicitation next week.
A competing company, Utility Associates, has claimed that specifications in the county’s request for proposal, or RFP, either uniquely fit Axon’s product or exclude Utility without actually measuring which firm would provide a superior system for capturing and digitally managing evidence.
The potential changes come after the San Antonio ExpressNews asked about several of the RFP’s requirements.
“In light of the questions you raised and comments from others, the stakeholders for this RFP intend to meet next week to go over the requirements and perhaps make some changes,” Bexar County purchasing agent Mary Quinones wrote in an email. “Should any changes be made, the RFP will be updated and an extension for response time will be made.”
Bexar commissioners narrowly voted to require competitive bidding in March after County Manager David Smith estimated that Axon’s contract would cost double that of Utility, at a total of $8.3 million compared to $4.2 million in a 10-year span. Some commissioners said they did not understand why it was worth paying so much more for Axon’s services and had hoped the RFP would shed light on which company provides the best value.
But several criteria in the RFP contain similar language to arguments made by Salazar and his chief of staff, James Serrato, at a Commissioners Court meeting in February. That discussion included input from Axon and Utility and created so much con- fusion that commissioners put off their decision until the next meeting in March, when they then sought open bidding.
“The RFP process will be much deeper and give us much more information in regards to, ‘OK, if you’re going to charge us double, what’s the rationale behind that?’ What is it we’re paying for?” Commissioner Kevin Wolff said after the decision.
Commissioners voted in 2015 to give Utility almost $900,000 under Salazar’s predecessor, Susan Pamerleau, for 300 body and in-car cameras, but only 42 body-camera systems had been deployed by January 2017 when Salazar took office. A provision in state law had allowed the county to select Utility from a list of prequalified vendors without going through an RFP.
Salazar declined to comment for this story, deferring to the purchasing department because the RFP process was underway.
“We will adhere to the guidelines set forth for us with regard to the process and, ulti- mately, the final selection,” Salazar said in a statement. “Until the selection is made, the BCSO is unable to comment regarding vendors and/or the ongoing process for selection.”
‘Cell phones for cops’
The RFP’s first requirement mandates the device “be engineered and designed for the sole purpose of being a BWC (body-worn camera) for law enforcement.” Utility vertically integrates its system onto modified Android smartphones, which by nature can perform other functions, while Axon creates body-worn camera devices.
That requirement irritated Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert, who has been the court’s leading skeptic of Salazar’s preference for Axon. Calvert said he found no evidence
in the Department of Justice’s “body-worn camera toolkit,” a resource for local agencies, that body cameras are any worse if they perform other functions.
Calvert also was unaware that the request for proposal had been released until asked about it Monday, despite having requested in March a chance to ensure it was “fair to all.”
“The fact that they put the RFP out without following through on what I asked is an indicator that there’s something to hide,” Calvert said.
Several county entities helped craft the RFP: the purchasing department, the sheriff ’s office, information technology, the district attorney’s office and the budget department. County spokesperson Monica Ramos did not know which officials from the various departments weighed in on it.
In February, one of the first concerns Salazar raised to commissioners was that he didn’t believe Utility’s system “would stand up to the rigors of police work.”
“I think any of us that has ever dropped a cellphone, even from table height, knows that those results can be somewhat disastrous at times,” Salazar said. “To me, it seemed cumbersome and limited. There were clothing restrictions, there was a very limited battery life. To me, there was an absence of key features that needed to be present for first responders, such as a passive recording, which could be accomplished under the current system but at detriment to the battery life.”
Several of those concerns made it into the RFP, including a requirement that cameras “must be able to withstand a six-foot drop.” Utility chief revenue officer Chris Lindenau said Utility’s system would fit that specification.
During their February meeting, Serrato showed commissioners photos of the cameras after they were dropped from a five-story garage. Axon’s cam- eras remained intact. The Android phone’s screen shattered. Serrato acknowledged that the demonstration was “extreme,” but intended to compare the toughness of the devices.
Axon spokesman Steve Tuttle echoed Salazar’s concerns about the durability of an Android-based system.
“If you give a piece of equipment to a police officer, they’re going to beat that thing up 10 times quicker than you can ever expect,” Tuttle said. “You’ve got to put it in field, and make sure it can stand the rigors of going through fighting, tackling, being thrown against the wall. ... I would hate to be the guy making cellphones for cops.”
What counts as an accessory?
The county’s bid solicitation also lists a “mandatory” priority that body cameras “must have a field of view that is equal to or greater than normal human vi- sion without the need for additional accessories.” While Axon meets the requirement, Utility’s system requires deputies to at- tach a lens, which the company includes with the product, to expand its field of view.
Lindenau said he was unsure whether the lens is considered an “accessory,” but he nonetheless worried that if cameras can capture footage outside what the human eye can pick up, jurors might hold deputies accountable for actions they couldn’t actually see.
Asked about the issue after the March meeting, Salazar said, “The more complete of a picture I can give that end user, that jury, that prosecutor, that judge — the more information I can give them from the onset, the better it is.”
Tuttle added that despite “the sheer volume of feedback” Axon receives from its deployment, 39 of the 69 largest U.S. law enforcement agencies use Axon cameras, the company has not heard anyone complain the cameras “show too much.”
Another specification related to Salazar’s concerns requires that cameras have a “stand-by battery life” of 12 hours, including “pre-event buffering, without recharging or swapping out additional batteries.” Lindenau said Utility’s cameras were not able to do that when Salazar took office in January 2017 but now can. Lindenau attributed that requirement to Salazar’s apparent refusal to meet with company representatives who could explain how its technology has evolved.
“If in good faith the sheriff would engage in discussions with us, he would see how close we are to meeting all of his requirements for successful body-camera programs,” Lindenau said.
According to Utility, and a re- view of email communications from the company, Salazar has met with Utility employees just twice: in June 2017, and in a brief sitdown after the February meeting. The email records show Utility executives were frustrated about being
“blacklisted from all communications,” though Salazar has denied preventing his team from communicating with Utility.
Axon vs. Utility
The city of San Antonio awarded Axon a deal worth up to $16.6 million in 2015 for camera equipment, training and other components for the police department. Serrato, then employed at SAPD with Salazar, oversaw field testing with several brands, along with contract negotiations and “full implementation of over 2,000 cameras.”
Salazar cited that experience, and his own familiarity with the program, when explaining to commissioners why he directed Serrato to do “a deep dive ... to find out where we were with the current vendor” when he took over as sheriff.
Axon went head-to-head for the SAPD contract with Vievu, a company Axon has since acquired. The scoring matrix for that contract shows Axon beat out Vievu in every major area, including experience, background and qualifications, the companies’ “proposed plans,” and the price schedule.
Meanwhile, Utility has a history of challenging decisions by city councils to choose other vendors, including an unsuccessful lawsuit in Austin that claimed the city had crafted its bidding process to favor Axon, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
In Albuquerque, Utility lost out to Axon on a five-year,
$4.4 million contract in May 2017. Some city council members were hesitant because the state’s attorney general was investigating the city’s prior $2 million no- bid contract with Axon; the former police chief began consulting for Axon while on the city’s payroll, the Albuquerque Journal reported.
That RFP tested whether vendors met “law enforcement functionality” for the cameras, digital evidence storage, configuration, training, support, maintenance services and other requirements. Axon came out on top.
Quinones stressed that the county intends to avoid favoring one company over the other.
“We really strive to make it generic so all the vendors can propose on something,” Quinones said of the bidding.
But before the county decided to consider RFP amendments, Calvert couldn’t hide his irritation at the process.
“This is a complete waste of my time when we can do it right the first time,” he said. “I mean, who has time for these games?”
A separate document, outlining the “scope of work” and other vendor requirements, says applicants must submit audited financial statements for the past three years. Axon is a publicly traded company, while Utility remains private, meaning its investors would likely balk at publicly sharing such data. Quinones said most county solicitations require it, though the stakeholders would discuss it when deciding whether to modify the RFP.
In February, Axon national director Andrew Grayson told commissioners a company’s financial information will show “how much they spend in
R&D, how large is their department, and how many officers they’ve actually deployed.”
Smith, the county manager, gave commissioners a financial comparison of the companies at the following meeting that showed Axon had 20 times as many employees as Utility and carried a much lower risk of “no longer becoming viable,” though Utility’s “cash flow strength” slightly outperformed Axon’s.
“This is a complete waste of my time when we can do it right the first time. I mean, who has time for these games?”
Commissioner Tommy Calvert