After city switched to a new bodycam vendor, Axon threatened its credit rating

Not to be too &quot;chaotic-good&quot; here but it&#x27;s somewhat invigorating seeing the government getting treated by businesses the way normal people are. Not to say that this is some kind of poetic justice, but hopefully by sleeping in the bed they&#x27;ve made it will be a wakeup call for them to make things a little fairer.<p>Then again this is probably a small city council we&#x27;re talking about. Not exactly the federal government. So yeah, it sucks.

Axon are the guys offering &quot;free body cams for every officer&quot; as a marketing line, which is truly genius. Citizens can demand body cameras saying &quot;well, hey, they&#x27;re free, you have no excuse&quot;. But the money is in that cloud service that the body cams upload to, and the fun part is that once a department is putting their data into it, they might be <i>legally required</i> to maintain it years after they stop using Axon cameras.

Wow. That is a really misleading title.<p>It wasn&#x27;t a threat. The Axon employee said:<p>&gt; &quot;The only cancellation term is Termination for Non-Appropriations or lack of funding. There is a negative effect, however, as it can affect the credit rating of the City&quot;<p>Read the entire thing. It&#x27;s actually rather polite.

TL;DR:<p>City of Fontana PD entered into a small agreement to try out 5 body cameras and associated Cloud Storage. Contract was for 5 years (for some reason). Contract had several convenient ways to terminate it.<p>After trial, Fontana PD issues an RFP and the winner was a different vendor than the trial.<p>A few years later, IT department notices bill related to original contract that it realizes is not for anything. They try to terminate the contract, and the account rep for Axon tells them the only termination clause in the contract is for lack of appropriated funds and that terminating under the current conditions would result in the company putting a bad item on the PD&#x27;s credit report. (This was a lie)<p>Also, the company used to be called Taser and they were the originators of the famous Taser gun.<p>Pretty cruddy.

This sounds like fraud, but unless they get investigated and uncover a pattern of this behavior I&#x27;m sure it will be easy to dismiss it as a technical error.

This seems like a sensationalist title and article. It seems like this police department entered a contract with Axon and now wants to sever the contract partway to save costs. But they&#x27;ve already entered a business contract with the other entity here, so that&#x27;s on the police department. The actual email from the Axon employee also seems standard and professional. What&#x27;s the issue here?