After city switched to a new bodycam vendor, Axon threatened its credit rating
muckrock.com
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Then again this is probably a small city council we're talking about. Not exactly the federal government. So yeah, it sucks.
The police department doesn't lose the money the taxpayers do.
The laws in the democracies that exist are not, in fact, determined by a uniquely/canonically defined aggregate “will of the people”.
I don’t think that they even can be, as I don’t think that there can be a canonical definition for what the “will of the people” is.
The laws are the result of a particular choice of set-up of democratic systems, along with peoples actions and choices within those systems.
In practice as things currently are, and I believe also theoretically necessarily (except for randomness or other things not determined by a person’s choice), different persons have different degrees of influence over what laws are enacted, and over what the government does.
If you are telling someone that you and they are a certain organization, but the influence they have is minuscule (by some way of measuring), and you have the rest of the control, it seems reasonable that that person would object to your framing.
The government is not “us”, nor is it “those people”. The government is “it”. It is a useful structure which is generally good to have around, but does have a number of drawbacks at times, which it would be good for us to mitigate using what influence over it we may happen to have.
I am not saying this as against government or against democracy, which both seem better than the alternatives.
But democracy, I think, is good because of pragmatic reasons, not because it allows the government to “be us”.
It's not nothing new to give out free hardware and charge for service, but way you phrased it, if you aren't allowed to spin-up your own servers, it is a lie and it is not free.
It wasn't a threat. The Axon employee said:
> "The only cancellation term is Termination for Non-Appropriations or lack of funding. There is a negative effect, however, as it can affect the credit rating of the City"
Read the entire thing. It's actually rather polite.
So the real story here is that "...between turnover within the police department and a trusting approach to its relationship with the company, neither the IT department, which handles payments for recurring annual technology costs in the City of Fontana, nor the police department had actually consulted the specific terms of the agreement until contacted for this article."
I've lost count of the number of times I've seen parties sit down and disagree about a business deal without having ever read the contract they've both signed. Any time I go to a meeting to discuss a relationship that's governed by contract I read the contract ahead of time, and often I'm the only one in the room who has. It can be a lot of fun to inform someone who's trying to renegotiate a better deal that they've been in violation of their own terms and conditions for years. "And you want us to give more up when you haven't even kept your end of the bargain?" I can see the Taboola ad now: "One mom's weird trick to prevail in negotiations..."
It sounds like the PD isn't getting their money's worth with Axon, and the citizens of Fontana aren't getting their money's worth with the PD or city officials. If the title should change, it is "City officials careless with contracts; Axon also terrible to deal with."
It's likely that rep was just used to more recent deals whose contracts did contain language like that.
"The only cancellation term is Termination for Non-Appropriations or a lack of funding," was their reply, which was false, and they're making a positive statement about the nature of a contract apparently without having first reviewed said contract. I'm not an attorney and I know not to do that.
If someone asks me a question as it relates to the terms of a contract, I would never respond without reviewing, or if I did, state that "I haven't had a chance to review it but if memory serves..." If someone says, "we want out of this contract," I would never say, "you haven't satisfied the conditions for cancelation" without reviewing the conditions for cancelation.
If only because I may want to do business with that company or someone who works there in the future, and referencing the terms of a fair deal (which it looks like this was) is the best way to mitigate any unjustifiably bad feelings coming as the result of it. Terrible practice by Axon and they wound up in the news over it. The same could be said for the city and PD. Precisely nobody looks good in this scenario, and a quick search of the contract would have saved the city thousands and a lot of bad PR.
Just because Axon isn't the only bad guy in this story doesn't mean they aren't the bad guy.
Which was a false statement on the part of Axon.
Those contracts didn't come from thin air - Axon chose to write contracts so that they can threaten others with a hit to their credit rating.
City of Fontana PD entered into a small agreement to try out 5 body cameras and associated Cloud Storage. Contract was for 5 years (for some reason). Contract had several convenient ways to terminate it.
After trial, Fontana PD issues an RFP and the winner was a different vendor than the trial.
A few years later, IT department notices bill related to original contract that it realizes is not for anything. They try to terminate the contract, and the account rep for Axon tells them the only termination clause in the contract is for lack of appropriated funds and that terminating under the current conditions would result in the company putting a bad item on the PD's credit report. (This was a lie)
Also, the company used to be called Taser and they were the originators of the famous Taser gun.
Pretty cruddy.
https://www.businessinsider.com/taser-accused-of-anticompeti...
https://www.businessinsider.com/tom-swift-and-his-electric-r...
This leads the police into a false sense of security and they may not realize that tazing someone could kill them, leading them to overuse or overreact in some cases
I never liked the less-than-lethal term either to be honest. It's still disingenuous. Potentially-lethal or Occasionally-lethal is more accurate and better describes the risks associated with their use.
Still, with a clause as clear as that one sounds, it doesn't take hiring a lawyer to get a sense of what one's options are. They should have read it. Axon shouldn't have put the legal screws to them without doing some due diligence.
It's a lie. To keep you paying.
The Axon employee misrepresented the contract. Or what some people call 'lying'.
What is the rep was lied to by whoever trained them in the company? Or they aren't a lawyer and just misunderstood the contract?
You are right, I don’t know the state of mind if the rep — they could have been trained to lie, but then the problem remains. Either an agent if the company lied, or the company trained its agents to lie.
That does leave the possibility of gross incompetence, that the rep was untrained, did not understand the contract and innocently told the customer something that sounded plausible. Sure.