It’s been close to 10 years since the Denver Police Department first donned body-worn cameras in January 2016, and technology has advanced since then. 

The Department of Public Safety is asking the City Council to approve a new five-year, $27 million contract with Arizona-based Axon for 2,563 body cameras and 2,175 Tasers.

Members of the City Council’s Health and Safety Committee on Wednesday advanced the request to the council as a whole to consider.

The city has had a contract with Axon since July 2015.

That 10-year, $22 million contract expires Dec. 15, with the proposed new contract commencing on Jan. 1, 2026.

In addition to new hardware, the contract includes camera docking ports, which serve as a secure central hub for uploading evidence and recharging the cameras’ batteries.

The contract, if approved by the City Council, would be spread across the DPD, the Denver Sheriff’s Department, and the Denver Fire Department.

According to the contract, DPD would receive 1,725 Axon Body 4 Cameras with individual and multi-bay docking stations, replace aging hardware and software for 13 interview rooms and 1,450 Taser units. 

The Denver Sheriff’s Department would receive 725 new body cams and 400 Tasers.

Along with uniformed law enforcement officers, arson investigators from the Denver Fire Department would also get 13 new body cams but not Tasers.

“Their (Denver Fire Department) portion of this contract is specific to body-worn cameras with charging docks, digital evidence management, and digital evidence storage, and this is in a quantity of 13 to cover their arson investigators,” said Department of Public Safety spokesperson Emily Lauck. “And so, this is not legally required, but departmentally, we consider this the best practice given the certain law enforcement functions and investigatory functions that our arson investigators do.”

Colorado’s Enhance Law Enforcement Safety Act mandated that by July 1, 2023, all law enforcement agencies provide body-worn cameras to each peace officer who interacts with the public.

All three agencies would receive unlimited cloud storage on Evidence.com, a digital evidence management platform for storing both Axon- and third-party-generated digital evidence.

City officials say it centralizes the collection and sharing of digital evidence throughout the criminal justice process. 

Also incorporated into the contract is an upgrade to aging Taser weapon hardware within the police and sheriff departments that will no longer be supported and are at the end of their useful life.

Denver Sheriff Department Chief Kelly Bruning said that when it comes to Tasers, his department is currently using 20-year-old technology. 

“They are not under warranty, and they are not fixable if something happens to them,” Bruning said. “And then also, we do question the reliability of those devices due to the age and the fact that they are three versions behind — the new Taser 10s provide better training opportunities for us.”

The city, according to Axon representative Ben Rubke, has the option to opt out of the company’s customer experience improvement program, or ACEIP. 

The program, if selected, permits the company to use customer content to accelerate its technology development. 

Some members of the City Council, as well as local privacy advocates, remain cautious about such “opt-in” features after public outcry over several cases in the metro area in which data from Flock license plate-reading cameras was inadvertently shared with outside law enforcement agencies through a default setting that permitted nationwide access.

Funds for the new contract have already been allocated in the 2026 public safety budget, said Chanee Cummings, the department’s chief financial officer.

The resolution is expected to be presented to the council on Dec. 8.