Pricing plans for police body cameras revealed

The company that was selected to provide the police department with body cameras said the system could cost up to $12.8 million.
Last week, officials including Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and Police Commissioner Kevin Davis announced that Taser International was chosen from three companies to provide the body cameras.
At Wednesday’s Board of Estimates meeting, the bid was formally opened and read aloud.
According to the pricing in the bid, a basic plan for the company’s Axon body-worn camera costs about $3.9 million. A similar plan for the Axon Flex costs about $4.2 million.
The unlimited plan, which includes GPS, file-sharing and cloud storage, costs about $12.8 million over five years.
If that seems like a lot of options, those aren’t the final prices. Rawlings-Blake has said the City was leaving room to potentially negotiate the price. Officials are aiming to have a contract in place by the end of February. They tested a system with body-worn cameras, and a cloud storage system.
The body cameras are seen as a way to bring transparency in the wake of the multiple controversial incidents with police that were caught on video, including the death of Freddie Gray. Outfitting Baltimore police with body cameras has been more than a year in the making. Rawlings-Blake initially vetoed a City Council bill creating a program, then convened a working group to study the issue. The pilot was conducted in the fall.