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Today’s note is a snapshot of the law enforcement technology market coming out of IACP, the biggest conference of the year. We’ll look at who won the hype cycle, what product announcements mean for the future of public safety tools, and what questions the company statements raise.
TL;DR
Motorola wins with a royal flush of new product announcements. These are not upgrades, but whole evolutions that leverage their PTT expertise and recent acquisitions to make a case for what public safety should look like. APX NEXT brings PTT and video together. The bodyworn camera market has a new strategy with the V300’s detachable battery. CommandCentral Records will unify Motorola’s disparate suite of records, evidence, and analysis products (2020).
Utility makes bold statement that they are here to compete with the Axons and Motorolas of the world. Smart ALPR brings AI to the in-car video market. Utility goes head to head with Shotspotter by developing Active Shooter Response Technology, a fixed gunshot detection product. Ultimate Witness connects their DEMS platform to the courts.
RapidDeploy lays out an interesting, alternative path to building a full-stack LE platform. The Lightning Partner program is designed to build an integrated best-of-all-worlds suite across multiple vendors.
Bodyworn cameras have undergone a state change. Battery life is now commoditized, and agencies now are able to weigh different value propositions than previously offered.
The IACP (Int’l Association of Chiefs of Police) Conference was Oct 26-29 in Chicago, which makes me 3 IACP years old. IACP is the Super Bowl of conferences in law enforcement. Chiefs come to hold court and receive homage from… well, everyone who isn’t a chief. Command staff arrive by the thousand to network and drink with colleagues, friends, and (possible) future business partners. They’ll sit through three days of trainings, of which 25% might be interesting. Almost 600 vendors come to schmooze and jockey for position on the exposition hall floor, willing themselves into becoming those future business partners. The old guard of retired LE professionals are always invited, and will give their unsolicited opinions on the new gear, tech, trainings, and personnel appointments to anyone who will listen. It’s a smorgasbord of progress, vaporware, handshake deals, and hype. It’s where the cultural narrative for law enforcement is reconstituted for another year. It’s the epicenter of policing.
For those reasons, public safety companies tend to stack product announcements and PR releases and partnership declarations around this time. Today I’ll rank the firms that lined up their marketing efforts for a big reveal right before or at IACP and talk about what that means for the company’s strategy and public safety as a whole. Let’s jump right in:
Motorola - A
A few companies in public safety derive an unbelievable amount of market power from being the best at one key product. Motorola has been the premier player in the radio and PTT space since the 1930’s. This long-term dominant position enables impressive margin growth, which is then used to invest in other, adjacent products. The lineup of announcements Motorola made coming into this IACP is the Tom Brady of product releases. First, they introduced the APX NEXT Smart Radio, which looks absolutely wild.
It’s the first radio with a touch screen in public safety. Touch screens have been the hot thing for a long time, but it hasn’t been as successful on in-car tablets (MDTs) as industry expected. The rise of mobile has given more and more agencies access to cheaper LTE devices (smartphones). Smartphones have proven use cases for touchscreens, and have proven value, so giving them to officers makes sense. However, it’s expensive to have LTE-connected devices. Each device requires it’s own data plan, which is not cheap. If you have an MDT in the car, a handheld device, and a smart bodyworn camera, it adds up. Motorola is betting here that the APX NEXT will cut off the need for a handheld LTE device. “You need LMR anyway, why not just buy our push-to-talk (PTT) device and we’ll give you the ability to use it like a smart handheld device?”
To that end, Motorola also announced ViQi, a virtual partner that “allows officers to quickly and discreetly retrieve critical information from remote databases through simple voice queries, including [license plate numbers, DL information, and vehicle identification numbers (VIN)]. Motorola Solutions is working on future iterations of ViQi, such as calling for vehicle assistance, taking statements and foreign language speech translation.” Natural language processing and voice commands are the common knowledge frontier in public safety. Everyone knows that everyone else is working on it, but we’ve yet to see the killer use case for it. Motorola’s prior is likely that since officers are already comfortable talking into the radio to work with dispatch on simple lookups, working with a radio-based smart assistant will come naturally and will be a valuable addition.
So Motorola hits you with the sexy new radio. Okay, they’re a radio mainstay, it makes sense. Then what do they do? BAM! They hit you with a left hook in the bodyworn camera market with the release of their Watchguard V300. This is a watershed moment. For the last few years it felt like the industry was waiting for battery technology to improve to where a 12+ hour shift is table stakes. That dynamic enabled a few vendors to hammer officer safety and agency accountability to win contracts. Motorola (and Panasonic) have cleared that hurdle by going around it instead of over. Now a first responder can start their shift by slapping a new battery in and hitting the street.
Swappable batteries in a camera introduce an agency-friendly business model and agency-friendly shift flexibility. When batteries were the bottleneck for BWCs and a recharge took over three hours, agencies were restricted in how they procured cameras. Battery life forced agencies to buy one per officer (plus spares), as the cameras could only go one shift before requiring time to upload video data and recharge. Now the question for a chief/techie/procurement official has changed. “Do I need a camera per officer, or do I need a camera per officer on patrol? That could mean spending half as much on hardware… Is the digital evidence management system (DEMS) of this vendor differentiated enough to be worth it? Does it provide enough value to justify the cost?”
There are now three or four viable visions for the future of bodyworn cameras:
Traditional camera and dock, led by Axon
Software on a dedicated mobile device, led by Utility
Swappable batteries on a lightweight camera, led by Motorola (and Panasonic)
Device-agnostic app on multi-purpose mobile device, to be proven on FirstNet (Visual Labs as the model)
Third, Motorola indicated that big software upgrades are coming in 2020. Motorola’s CommandCentral is their full stack LE product suite, but today is best known for being their real-time intelligence platform. The company has been criticized in the past for having software solutions that are not well integrated, partly as a result of acquiring and then maintaining other companies and products. This announcement appears to be a meaningful step in the direction of consolidation, covering their records management and community engagement solutions. CommandCentral Records will become the new standard records product, replacing Spillman Flex (an acquisition) and PremierOne Records (proprietary, legacy) with one cloud-based solution.
Lastly, and least important because of how far it is from Motorola’s core products, Vigilant (an acquisition) announced ballistics analysis and pattern crime intelligence tools that should be valuable additions to investigative units.
Utility - B+
Utility’s Bodyworn product started making waves around 2015 as the first differentiated product in a market of BWC clones. By focusing on software and leveraging the tech already embedded in what are essentially smartphones, Utility claimed parity in GPS location and superiority in gyroscopic features like ‘Officer-Down,’ which alerts dispatch when a patrol officer quickly becomes prone. In the years since, the company has released an in-car video product and a DEMS to solidify themselves as player in the digital evidence space. Utility is now taking some bold swings on AI at the frontier of their existing product lines and new adjacent products.
The Smart ALPR, developed in partnership with Sony, is the first worth breaking down. Automated license plate readers are nothing new; static systems have been installed in cities since the 1970s. They have, however, been expensive and immobile. Cities like a San Diego or a Tucson or a Ft. Lauderdale may or may not have the funds to install ALPR at all their main entry/exit points. If they do, they can automate the search for vehicles associated with missing persons, vehicles wanted in connection with criminal activity, and stolen vehicles. These are, I would argue, overwhelmingly good things. Utility has built ALPR into the in-car video product. ALPR is now cheap(er) and mobile.
The broad introduction of this tech also grants police departments with an extreme version of a discretionary power that they always held. I’ve been on many, many ride-alongs with officers who describe themselves as ‘hunters.’ Hunters try to be as proactive as possible. When they have time between calls for service they’ll run plates, looking for stolen cars and cars associated with crime. At red lights, in alleys, good neighborhoods and bad; as many plates as they can, which isn’t all that many, given that it takes effort to enter a plate number into NCIC and a few seconds for the system to ping back info on that car. It’s the cop version of a slot machine: it costs ten seconds, but you might hit a jackpot and help someone find their stolen car. It’s manual and discretionary. Now, it’s automated. A patrol vehicle will run all plates nearby all the time, which increases a power that has already been abused.
This is exactly the type of development that society has to grapple with. There are questions here that need answering from Utility and the agencies that buy this software:
What sort of retention policies are in place on (a) the video itself and (b) NCIC queries?
The press release states that the ALPR “notifies officers immediately about license plates flagged in the system for a wide range of offenses, including suspended plates, expired drivers' licenses, stolen vehicles, and violent offenders” (emphasis mine). An officer would need to search the driver to know if their DL was expired, or to run a criminal history search to know if they were previously a violent offender; do we want officers to know these things before interacting with a driver? You could make an argument for officer safety on the violent offender side, but before even pulling them over for a real infraction? These are real questions that have been punted by Utility, and have not been dealt with at the state level either.
Let’s keep this in mind for when we get to Axon’s announcements.
Utility also announced Active Shooter Response Technology, a new gunshot detection product. The most well-known incumbent in this space is the struggling ShotSpotter, a public company (ticker SSTI) which has lost two thirds of its market cap in the last six months. Think of gunshot detection as the audio equivalent of fixed ALPR: it is a tool that helps law enforcement respond to firearms without needing a call for service and can help identify and solve crimes. The technology involved isn’t complicated and the total addressable market is only around a billion dollars, but this move by Utility shows that they are not restricting themselves to video evidence and they are aggressively seeking alternative revenue streams within public safety.
Finally, Utility is expanding their DEMS platform with Ultimate Witness, which shares their evidence with the court system. This has become table stakes for legitimate DEMS providers, so they are late to the game. Important nonetheless. This channel gets less attention than it deserves, but we’ll cover it another time.
RapidDeploy - B
In public safety, the choices between build/buy/partner are critical to get right. Do you buy a small company that does a feature or service very well? If so, do you have a plan to integrate them into your current ecosystem? Do you partner? How will you split revenues? What does that mean from a software integration perspective? From a customer cost perspective? From a deployment and user experience perspective? How much will it cost and how long will it take to build yourself? Companies I’ve seen that try to line up partners without considering these questions all the way through inevitably feel a hangover later. Good product and executive teams define these questions carefully and answer them correctly.
Without knowing if RapidDeploy looked at the tradeoffs, we can at least say that the Lightning Partner Program marries RapidDeploy to Partner (with a capital P) as a strategy for building a complete LE platform. With the firm’s principles of open APIs, eradicating data silos, and a cloud-first approach, it’s a bet that makes sense. It’s safe to assume that the partnership with RapidSOS (with whom some of RapidDeploy’s leadership have experience) has paid dividends. Not including stakeholders Samsung and Microsoft, the first four Lightning Partners are:
GeoComm, GIS-data hosting solutions
Getac Video Solutions, bodyworn cameras, in-car video and other software solutions
Optimum, a records management vendor
Orion Labs, an AI-enabled PTT vendor
Time will tell if the “best-in-breed” approach wins out. The (underrated) benefit to customers is that the cost of integrating disparate systems goes away. One of the things that agencies hate most is paying to make vendors’ systems talk to each other. Frankly, I believe that it is immoral to make public sector entities pay private companies to make their systems interoperable, especially in a mission-critical context. RapidDeploy is putting their foot down and saying, “look, if you meet a handful of requirements, we will make sure that never happens for the benefit of first responders.” The downside is, from a business strategy perspective, you become an interchangeable cog. Replaceable. At the expense of adding value to the agency, you decrease your own leverage and market power. Bundling products for cost savings is now off the table (unless they rework these partnerships for reselling power) and pricing flexibility is reduced.
Panasonic - B
Panasonic announced their new BWC, DEMS, and AI-powered redaction. From what I heard of IACP, it received a good deal of attendee buzz, as well. It’d be a bigger deal if they hadn’t released their camera at the same time as Motorola, but that’s the risk you take optimizing for IACP. This is a strong announcement from Panasonic, however, given that it wasn’t that long ago they were looking for buyers of their Public Safety division. Instead, they expanded their existing product suite of Toughbook mobile data terminals (MDTs, aka in-car laptops) and in-car video to encompass competitive bodyworn cameras and their DEMS platform. The cameras have a swappable battery like the Watchguard V300. Again, hard to overstate how compelling it is that they and Motorola have blazed a new bodyworn camera path.
Other vendors have had AI redaction studios for a while, but it brings Panasonic closer to parity and is a huge step in the right direction.
Tyler Tech - B-
Tyler announced their rebranding of Socrata’s cloud-based analytics platform. Before Tyler acquired them in 2018, Socrata was the premier open data platform in the public sector, used for data visualization and centralization across financial, geospatial, operational, and performance databases. It was a powerful tool for breaking down public sector data silos. This announcement, while minor, indicates that Socrata’s incredible potential will be focused - or shoehorned, if you believe this is a bad thing - into supporting Tyler’s larger products. Tyler has a wide array of products, so it likely won’t be restricted to only law enforcement, but Socrata’s role as an independent and open platform will probably be diminished.
New World is one of the legacy CAD/RMS vendors acquired by Tyler, but it has a dedicated user base and so has not been sunsetted. Tyler is putting New World ShieldForce on Android, which will bring CAD functionality onto smartphones, tablets, and watches. I’ve thought for while that wearables have been getting short shrift in public safety. Three reasons to be optimistic about the increased role of wearables:
Cost. Data plans for devices are expensive - wearables have most of the benefit of LTE without the cost. Pairing multiple devices to one central connected device seems like a rational move.
Visual. It increases the total surface area that first responders can glance at to receive continuous and critical information. Instead of needing the MDT in the vehicle, or even a smartphone, an officer could potentially glance at a smartwatch for call updates from dispatch.
Data. Like using the gyroscope in the mobile device for an "‘Officer-Down’ feature, wearables could expand the types of data used in officer safety. How would an agency’s operations use blood pressure, heart rate, or other biometric signatures? Will unions allow it?
Tyler also had the most confusing announcement of the IACP media cycle: a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS (Amazon).
“Specifically, the agreement with AWS provides the framework for development, training and collaboration in order to support next-generation applications that have the scalability, resiliency, and security AWS offers. It will assist Tyler in accelerating innovation and the development of strategic initiatives. These initiatives will bring the most advanced cloud-native services to Tyler clients, improving the flow of information and providing a better experience for state, local, and federal governments.”
What does that mean? If the meat of the agreement is in the press release, then it doesn’t mean much. It seems like it’s a service level agreement that ensures Tyler Tech developers are trained on AWS’s latest and greatest. If it also means that Tyler can use AWS employees/resources/pre-release products to develop “strategic initiatives,” then that’s a bigger deal. The main takeaway here is that Tyler is all-in on AWS as their cloud partner and there will be collaboration, but there is nothing exclusive or particularly strategic that’s clear yet.
Two other minor announcements: Tyler acquired Courthouse Technologies, extending their near-monopolistic lead over the rest of the court management system market, and they rebranded Sage Data Security to Tyler Cybersecurity.
Axon - B-
Over the last 10-15 years, Axon has been the torchbearer of the law enforcement zeitgeist. They’re the cool kids. They throw the biggest party, they man one of the largest booths, and they’ve got a track record of bold, mold-breaking products. Last year Axon went all out by announcing Taser 7, Axon Body 3, and Axon Records. This year, the word on the exhibition floor was that Axon felt the positive, slow burn of last year’s showing. Agencies had a year to digest the whole of Rick Smith’s vision, and were excited by the progress. This year’s announcements were more tame, the biggest being that Fleet 3 with ALPR, Axon’s equal to Utility’s Smart ALPR, will be coming in around 12 months. While the announcement itself doesn’t set the industry on fire, what it does do is light a fire under the rest of the industry and municipal governments to figure out the appropriate bounds and constraints. Leveraging their AI Tech and Ethics Board, Axon has set a standard of publishing - a year in advance - a comprehensive document that outlines the benefits, concerns, and recommended guardrails in the development of a product that could change policing for better or worse. I won’t list all the findings here, but I encourage you to at least check out the fifteen recommendations that start on page 29, and the the full ALPR Ethics Report if you have the time. It’s well done. I’ll paraphrase the recommendations at the end of this note.
It will be fascinating to see the differences between this product’s reception in the public versus Axon’s competitors’ products. One thing that neither Utility nor Axon addressed is the extra cost of an LTE-connected in-car video system. Axon is now pushing for LTE capability in AB3 and Fleet 3. Say an agency has issued MDTs and smartphones to everyone on patrol. Those two devices require LTE connectivity to do their jobs. Adding two more connected products is asking them to double their internet bill for every officer.
Axon also announced that AB3 and Axon Records are live at Cincinnati PD. This is sort of true - a records module called Axon Standards is live, but the entire RMS is not. That project is well underway and it seems CPD is happy with what they’ve deployed so far, so this is an important development for Axon. They now can claim two major cities (with Fresno) as happy Axon Records customers with more certain to come.
CentralSquare - C
In my eyes, a single partnership announcement is a C. It’s just talk unless it outlines a strategic thesis that the two or more companies are staking their reputations on. CentralSquare announced a partnership with Genetec, which they claim will break the silos of video and calls for service. Without knowing what the end user in an emergency comm center sees at the intersection between Genetec’s cameras and CentralSquare’s CAD products, we can definitely say that they are not the first to do this. At the legacy system level, Motorola has been doing this for years. Acquiring Vigilant arguably put Motorola in the driver’s seat in this space. At the experimental level, RapidDeploy’s RapidVideo feature enables live streaming from the 911 caller, which is a more concrete value proposition. And RapidDeploy owns the feature with no partnership necessary. CentralSquare’s announcement raises a couple questions, like how do they handle the video data in real-time? How about later in RMS?
They also published this Voice of the Citizen Survey, which was a fun read. The actual survey results are linked.
Mark43 - C
In August, Mark43 announced a partnership with Forensic Logic which waives integration fees between their two software solutions. Forensic Logic is a powerful source of truth, and other records management vendors should be exploring similar partnerships.
Esri - C
Esri announced a partnership with 3DR for an ArcGIS drone program. This is not a public safety announcement, but shows that Esri is keen on staying at the top of the location services heap.
Verizon - C-
Verizon announced their second cohort of 5G First Responder Lab graduates. This gets a C- because the heavy lifting is done by Responder Corp, one of the few VC firms focused on public safety.
FirstNet (ATT) - D+
The two most hated words in public safety are “the roadmap.” No big announcements here, but continuing to watch FirstNet closely.
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-MA
Axon’s ALPR Ethics Report Recommendations (Paraphrased):
Acquisition should be through an open, transparent, democratic process, with adequate opportunity for genuinely representative public analysis, input, and objection.
Agencies should not deploy ALPRs without a clear use policy.
Vendors should design ALPRs to facilitate transparency about their use, including sharing aggregate and de-identified data. Each agency should share this data with the community it serves.
Vendors should design their ALPRs so that agencies can adjust the list of vehicles to which an ALPR will alert law enforcement officers, so that the list includes only those offenses or reasons most of concern to that agency and its community. These lists should not be used to enforce civil infractions, offenses enforceable by citations, or outstanding warrants arising from a failure to pay fines and fees.
Vendors must provide the option to turn off immigration-related alerts so that jurisdictions can choose not to participate in federal immigration enforcement.
ALPRs must be designed and operated in ways that ensure alert lists are checked routinely for errors and kept up to date.
An ALPR alert, on its own, should not constitute sufficient grounds to stop a vehicle. Officers must make visual confirmation independently that the license plate matches, and if the offense is associated with the registered owner of the vehicle (as opposed to the vehicle itself), the officer should ascertain whether the driver is consistent with the description of the registered owner.
Vendors should work with agencies to determine the shortest possible retention period for ALPR data that is sufficient, and set that period as the default retention setting on its ALPRs.
ALPR design should create audit trails both of real-time ALPR alerts and agency accessing of historical data. Law and agency policy should require regular auditing of ALPR usage.
Stored ALPR data must be encrypted and secured against outside access and breach.
ALPR vendors should not retain the right to access or share ALPR data, and law enforcement’s ALPR data never should be shared for use by for-profit third parties.
ALPRs should be designed such that if agencies share data with other law enforcement agencies, they do so transparently and in a way that is governed by formal and lawful data-sharing agreements.
Vendors should never profit from fines and fees obtained through law enforcement use of ALPRs.
Vendors should provide adequate training materials for agencies and officers using its ALPRs, including about default settings and why they are set the way they are.
Data-gathering and impartial studies must be conducted on ALPR usage, so that communities and the country are aware of how ALPRs are being used, of what is required to make that usage effective, of any harms arising from ALPR usage, including whether ALPRs are exacerbating disparities, and of ways to eliminate or mitigate those harms.