The Springfield Police Department is looking to overhaul its body-worn camera system, its Taser arsenal and more – work that’s long overdue, according to the city’s top cop. The multi-million dollar undertaking went before the city council Monday.
Five years ago, Springfield Police started the process of equipping every officer in the department with body-worn cameras. It started with 12 in mid-2020, and by that fall, every officer was outfitted with one – making Springfield one of the first major cities in the commonwealth to do so.
The effort cost around $5 million over the span of a five-year contract with Getac, the city’s supplier – a sum meant to cover 500 cameras, charging stations and cloud storage, among other parts of the system.
Five years later, the contract’s up, and as Police Superintendent Larry Akers told the council Monday night, his department’s looking for a new vendor and beyond.
“We have, right now, a product - it's called Getac - and we've had them for the last five years, and that contract is expiring, and, to put it bluntly, that Getac product is just not up to par,” Akers told councilors. “It's not doing the things that we need them to do, and it's to the point [where] we're returning two cameras a week just … for repair. Their software updates are not keeping up with our needs, and their customer service has a lot to be desired.”
In a memo to the council, Chief Administrative & Financial Officer Cathy Buono noted the cameras are approaching the end of their useful life. WAMC has reached out Getac for comment.
With the contract ending in April, Akers said he put together a committee to weigh the department’s options. Their findings led to him and members of the department standing before the council Monday to get approval on funding to not just secure a new vendor, but perform other major upgrades.
“In many areas, we're still stuck in the 20th century, he said. “Our records management system - it hasn't been updated since probably 1994, 1995 - unless it was a piecemeal solution, just to get us by. We constantly use programs for things that they're not built to be used for, but we always find a way just to make it work. We continuously play catch-up, and we have to buy new software in one area just to make another area work.”
Akers contends that via $7.2 million dollars over a span of five years, the department can not only move to purchase 550 new body-worn cameras, but also fund significant software upgrades, bolstering the systems behind various public safety programs.
That, and fund the purchase of 350 Tasers, equipping every officer with one.
It was up to the council to approve a spending package meant to cover much of the initial costs – including a $2.5 million bond authorization, as well as a $1.5 million transfer from the city’s FY24 Certified Free Cash to the Finance Pay-Go Police Account.
The overhaul was met with support from the council, though members like Councilor-at-Large Jose Delgado admitted the over-$7 million figure packed some sticker shock.
Still, he says the case the department laid out makes sense.
“I mean, just the fact that they're updating software systems, they're updating stuff that talks to each other, which, [it] sounded like many of the systems don't talk to each other, the silos piece,” Delgado said, referencing Akers’s claim that various facets of the department’s systems are siloed off from one another. “So, the fact that they're going to have systems that are talking to each other will increase, not just the bundle savings from that, but also the efficiency of the time that our police officers have to be able to actually do real stuff versus the mundane tasks that they have there.”
Akers says a vendor agreed upon by a committee, Axon, offers the department a chance to get its cameras, software upgrades and tasers from one provider and likely save millions in one swoop.
There’s also the matter of the federal consent decree the department remains under since 2022. It calls for changes in policies and procedures including use-of-force, officer training, and internal investigations.
“In addition to Axon’s body-worn cameras and Taser software, their proposal provides us with a suite of updated software products that allow us, once again, for our professional standards unit, to achieve and maintain compliance with the DOJ settlement agreement by improving streamlining and tracking required policies, procedures and compliance metrics over the next five years,” Akers continued.
The spending package was approved unanimously.
Answering a question from Council Vice President Tracye Whitfield, Akers added that he hopes to have a new contract signed by March, giving the department about a month to train on and implement the new tech before the contract expires.
