The Pima County Sheriff’s Department is asking for a significant expansion of its contract with Axon Enterprise, the Scottsdale-based provider of policing technology.
County supervisors are set to vote Tuesday on extending the contract while more than doubling the county’s payments to Axon.
PCSD signed a 10-year contract with Axon in 2021 worth $26,578,000, primarily for the company’s “Officer Safety Plan,” which includes tasers, training software and body cameras. Tuesday’s amendment would extend that contract until 2036 and give the sheriff’s department up to $45 million in extra funds to purchase more products from Axon.
A pricing quote shows that PCSD currently plans to spend about $33 million of those additional funds. That includes over $18 million for Axon’s new “AI Era” software, as well as funds for prolonging “Officer Safety Plans” and for drone-related hardware.
The “AI Era” product includes a tool known as Draft One, which auto-generates police reports based on incident audio gathered by body cameras. A July report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that, in departments using Draft One, there is no way to tell which parts of the AI-assisted police reports were generated by AI and which were written by officers.
Through a spokesperson, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos canceled a previously scheduled AZPM News interview about the contract amendment. His office did not specify the reason for the cancellation and declined to answer questions over email.
At an initial discussion of the amendment in December, county supervisors raised questions about ownership of data generated by Axon’s body cameras and tasers. According to language in Pima County’s 2021 contract and the potential new amendment, Axon is unable to access or share PCSD data without county permission, with at least two exceptions: quality control using some data from taser use incidents and responding to “legal or governmental demand” for data.
If faced with such demands, the 2021 contract states that Axon will “reasonably cooperate with County in any effort to seek a protective order or otherwise to contest such required disclosure, at County’s expense.”
On Monday, District 3 Supervisor Jennifer Allen said these data privacy safeguards did not resolve her concerns about federal agencies — many of which also contract with Axon — seeking to access county data processed by the company.
“Normally, those assurances would be reassuring. But we’re not living in those times right now,” she said, citing recent federal efforts to access previously untapped sources of data for law enforcement.
Locally, University of Arizona police ran license plate searches for the U.S. Marshals Service, the federal court system’s enforcement arm, earlier this year.
Allen declined to reveal how she would vote on the Axon contract amendment, but she expressed skepticism of extending a contract that isn’t set to run out until 2031. She said Axon had come to PCSD first with the extension offer, promising to lock in a cheaper price for the county.
“Axon is pushing that we sign this contract early,” she said.
Meanwhile, the largest labor union within PCSD has come out against the contract extension, criticizing plans to purchase new AI software.
“It’s a nice toy, it’s not a huge time-saver in real, practical experience and it is not worth that amount of money,” said Sergeant Aaron Cross, president of the Pima County Deputy’s Organization.
He said officers still have to significantly edit AI-generated reports to bring them up to par and that AI tools miss many crucial details that experienced officers notice. Cross said many officers are leaving PCSD due to low pay and lagging morale, and argued that county money is better invested in its staff.
“The most financially sound investment the Board could make, we believe, is not in gadgets from Scottsdale, but the talented, experienced people in Pima County. The most valuable thing a deputy has is not training nor equipment, but experience,” he wrote in a letter to county supervisors.
