Mount Prospect police switching to new body-worn cameras

Resolving issues with the current cameras, Mount Prospect police will receive new body-worn and in-car cameras.

Mount Prospect trustees on Tuesday approved a five-year agreement with Axon Enterprise for the purchase of 90 body-worn cameras and 26 in-car cameras.

The deal is worth more than $1.7 million and includes a digital evidence management system with hardware, accessories, installation and software. The annual cost is more than $343,000.

The Axon Body 4 body-worn camera and the Axon Fleet 3 Mobile Video Recorder would replace the WatchGuard cameras currently in use.

Police Chief Michael Eterno said the current body-worn cameras have had some hardware reliability issues. The audio would cut out 10-15 minutes into an incident, he said. The workaround, he said, was doing a hard reset on the cameras at least once a week.

Another problem was meeting the state mandate to have the cameras run for 10 hours.

The new agreement would solve one of the bigger issues facing the department — a lack of central storage for digital evidence.

Evidence will be stored on Axon's Evidence.com cloud-based digital media storage site.

The package would include the Axon Redaction Assistant, which uses artificial intelligence to improve the time it takes to redact a body-worn camera video in response to a public records request.

The Axon Fleet 3 Mobile Video Recorders would also serve as automatic license plate readers.

Eterno said Axon products are used by an estimated 85% of law enforcement agencies across the country.

“Axon is not a stranger to law enforcement,” Eterno said. “They have basically blanketed the market when it comes to a lot of their products, specifically body worn cameras.”