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Never miss a moment: how the Axon Ecosystem can help you capture the digital evidence you need

Capturing “the truth” is more important now than ever before. In today’s day and age, seeing is believing, especially when it comes to use-of-force incidents. Failing to capture evidence, even evidence that is seemingly mundane, can lead to less-than-ideal outcomes. To make sure justice is always served, we must have a clear view of an entire incident.

So, how do we make sure we never miss a moment? The Axon Ecosystem helps public safety organizations boost safety and efficiency with five key components of digital evidence capture:

  • Reliable cameras

  • Real-time collaboration

  • Proper policy

  • Compliance safeguards

  • Fallback

Watch how the Axon Ecosystem helps you never miss a moment.

Reliable cameras

Reliable, simple-to-use cameras capture what really happened on-scene. 

The reliability of these devices, which are depended upon to capture the clear truth in any situation that ends up needing review, is of utmost importance,” explains Morgan Castorena, a Senior Product Manager for body-worn cameras at Axon. “Without cameras that officers and citizens can trust as reliable sources of truth for any and all incidents, moments would be missed, and [the] veracity of any critical encounters would be questioned.” 

For this reason, Castorena and her team have focused on building reliable cameras that are easy for officers to operate, with features such as a 13+ hour battery life, a high-quality sensor for clear, stable footage, and a configurable pre-recording buffer of 30-120 seconds to help capture the lead-up to an activation.

The key to having a true view of a scene is to capture it from as many angles as possible: from the point-of-view of the officer, the vehicle and the surrounding environment.

The position of the camera makes all the difference. In-car cameras, such as Fleet 3 cameras, provide footage of officers and detainees in a vehicle and can even include contextual clues such as speed and location of the vehicle. Body-worn cameras, on the other hand, capture the officer’s point of view when speaking to or interacting with a civilian,” says Castorena.

With Axon Body 4, the optional POV accessory gives even more visibility into an incident, capturing the scene from the officer’s point of view, lending critical insight into what has informed the officer’s decision-making. Furthermore, Axon Air drones give a perspective of the situation from the sky. 

This dedication to reliability and quality has made Axon Body 4, Fleet 3, and Axon Air products the standard in cameras for many agencies globally. “In an effort to show a completely unbiased perspective of the encounter or call for service, these cameras have become increasingly adopted, and are often times now expected by both law enforcement and the public,” concludes Castorena.

Real-time collaboration

Cameras are not only useful for reviewing incidents after the fact, but also for gaining situational awareness and real-time information that can affect the outcome of an incident. Connected capabilities through Axon devices, such as live locations, alerts, and streaming, provide actionable insight to boost officer safety and operational effectiveness in the moment.

Having the answers to key questions - Where are your officers? What do they see? Is there an escalation? Is backup needed? Did they draw their weapons? - in real-time can make the difference in driving safer outcomes. Seamless access to this critical information empowers timely, informed actions that shape effective resolutions. 

Officers can request a second set of eyes via a button on their camera, inviting their supervisor to live stream in and see an unfolding situation. Using Axon Body 4’s bidirectional communications feature, they can also communicate directly with supervisors, mental health experts, or translators to gain guidance on addressing and resolving situations while showing exactly what they’re facing through their cameras. This enhanced collaboration makes cameras an indispensable communication tool.

Proper policy

Clear and responsible policy protects both your agency and the public and ensures that the tools you use are helping to protect all parties, from camera usage in general to connected capabilities like alerts and live streaming. While Axon does not create specific policy protocols for public safety agencies, the International Association of Chief of Police, or IACP, does have a model policy for body-worn camera programs that agencies are welcome to review. Axon also offers policy guides as a starting point, both for body-worn camera programs in general as well as connected capabilities.

Agencies that do not adopt a clear, enforceable policy suffer from lower camera activation rates, as camera usage is left largely or entirely to the discretion of individual officers. This reduces the transparency and safety benefits cameras offer, as well as the return-on-investment agencies can receive from their camera programs. Ideally, policies should incorporate information about the circumstances under which officers must activate their body-worn camera, and procedures around the video review process and cadence conducted by supervisors.

Once a thoughtful body-worn camera policy is in place, the Axon Ecosystem can help assess and drive compliance with the policy.

Compliance safeguards

How can agencies ensure that officers are complying with policy? There are two key pieces of technology agencies use to proactively impact compliance: Axon Signal and Axon Performance.

These technologies are meant to address a growing trend. For many agencies, “the primary focus for policy compliance has shifted from reducing administrative workloads and reactively investigating incidents to ‘early intervention’,” explains Thuc Nguyen, a Product Manager for Axon Performance.

Agencies are “proactively spot-checking video footage to pre-emptively address bad habits before those bad habits turn into bad real-world outcomes. [It’s also] an opportunity to recognize good behaviors and continually train officers,” adds Nguyen.

Axon Signal for automatic activation

Axon Signal helps drive camera activation rates by automatically activating cameras based on configurable criteria. Physical hardware sensors like Signal Sidearm and Axon Fleet Signal Vehicle, as well as programmatic integrations with CAD systems, work to activate officers’ cameras in potentially critical incidents so that they can focus on the task at hand.

“Axon Signal supports automatic activations [of cameras] based on situations like a TASER 10 being armed or its trigger being pulled, a detected vehicle impact, or a firearm being unholstered,” explains Rafael Lopez-Uricoechea, a Senior Product Manager at Axon.

Lopez-Uricoechea emphasizes the benefit of configurable notifications attached to Signal activations. “An agency could set themselves up to receive mobile and web notifications whenever a TASER 10 is armed, and from there, a supervisor could tap or click on the notification to begin live streaming from the camera to instantly get increased awareness of the situation that is developing in the field.”

Remote Camera Activation from CAD is the last key piece of Axon Signal. “We’ve developed a way for agencies to integrate their existing CAD solutions with Axon Evidence such that for all or a subset of calls, cameras are automatically activated either based on which officers are assigned to the call or based on the location of the CFS,” remarks Lopez-Uricoechea.

Through CFS assignments, as soon as an officer is dispatched to a call, their camera turns on, which aligns well with many current agency policies. Through geofences, cameras that arrive to the scene of potentially critical incidents after the incident has begun are also activated once they reach the scene. St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office has already seen noteworthy increases in their activation rates using Remote Camera Activation.

These safeguards will only improve as time goes on. “One area that future cameras can continue improving is in the realm of automatic activations...We cannot expect humans to be accurate 100% of the time, which is why we need smart technology to identify situations that require evidential recordings. Not only will this boost up that reliability factor of cameras, it will also help reduce the cognitive load for officers and allow them to focus on other tasks at hand,” says Castorena.

Axon Performance for policy compliance review

Another key piece of the Axon Ecosystem that drives policy compliance is Axon Performance, allowing agencies to track toward their ideal camera activation rates and conduct positive coaching.

“Our Performance tool analyzes use of body-worn cameras within an agency and compares that to policy, helping to provide insight into compliance,” explains Castorena.

Axon Performance helps drive compliance in the following key ways:

  • Regular Video Reviews - Performance’s streamlined video review workflow reinforces the importance of activation to your officers and drives both professional accountability and compliance with your agency’s policy.

  • Activation “Carrots” - Performance uses positive reinforcement to boost camera activation rates. Officers receive encouragement and recognition if they consistently activate their body-worn camera above agency-configured goals.

  • Streamlined video review workflow - Performance offers the following features to make video review faster:

    • Real-time metrics - Agency leadership can monitor near-real-time metrics such as activation rates, ID rate, categorization rate and power cycling on the Performance dashboard.

    • Fair review - Performance allows agency leadership to randomly and fairly review recorded videos. Reviewed videos can then be used as examples for further training at the police academy.

    • Seamless systems - Directly stream videos from Axon Evidence within Performance’s own video review experience.

    • Priority-Ranked Video Audit - Priority-Ranked Video Audit (PRVA) selects the most “eventful” videos for supervisor review using keyword detection, TASER trigger events and Signal Sidearm events. Performance scores and ranks each video so that the most critical video is reviewed first.

By creating a fair, randomized video review process and reducing administrative workloads, Performance helps facilitate frequent feedback loops between supervisors and officers. 

Fallback

The “fallback” feature in the Axon Ecosystem is called Video Recall, a camera setting that allows recovery of a recording that was never actually “recorded,” a moment that otherwise would have been lost forever. This feature works to ensure transparency while still providing careful controls, permissions and strict privacy protection for agencies, officers and the public.

“Video Recall is a continuous “background buffer” that is always recording on Axon Body and Fleet cameras," explains Castorena. ”This functionality continuously captures and encodes evidence into 30-minute segments and stores them in a special partition of the camera’s memory...The storage area for Axon Body 4 can hold 18 continuous hours of footage [24 hours for Axon Fleet 3], and once that becomes full, the newest footage begins overriding the oldest.“

Video Recall footage remains on the camera unless explicitly “recalled” by an administrator with the appropriate permission. When recalling evidence, an admin can use the ViewXL Standalone application to select the time frame in which a critical incident happened and upload all footage from that time. The evidence is then uploaded into Axon Evidence and is available for playback and sharing with stakeholders.

This functionality was designed with officer privacy in mind. Given it is a fallback for when all other means of activation did not occur, it is important that it is not misused. Safeguards such as unique permission requirements to recall video, manual requisition processes, no playback functionality for recalled video, and a clear audit trail of Video Recall actions are among those features in place to protect officer privacy. 

After all, while technology is a huge asset, at the end of the day is it just that, an asset. Technology is a tool that is meant to benefit the humans who use it. 

“We designed and built these automatic activation features with officer privacy as a top of mind concern,” explains Lopez-Uricoechea. Therefore, the team created features such as Sleep Mode. “Officers can use the Sleep Mode functionality in their body-worn camera when they’re on a break or otherwise in a private situation. In addition to extending the running time and battery life of the camera, Sleep Mode prevents the camera from automatically activating.”

Axon staunchly supports officer privacy and autonomy, so ultimately the officer is always in control. If an automatic activation feature turns on an officer’s camera and the officer deems that activation to be a mistake, the officer can manually stop that recording with a single tap, just like any recording they start themselves.

Never miss a moment

When we put all of these pieces together: reliable cameras, real-time collaboration, informed policy, strong activation rates and fallback measures, we will Never Miss a Moment. We will capture truth. We will accelerate justice. And we will continue doing everything we can to protect life, for everyone.

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