Beware the Bundle: Companies Are Banking on Becoming Your Police Department’s Favorite "Public Safety Technology” Vendor

Deeplinks 2025-05-06

Summary:

When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades.

Axon has been adding AI to its repertoire, and it now features a whole “AI Era” bundle plan. One recent offering is Draft One, which connects to Axon’s body-worn cameras (BWCs) and uses AI to generate police reports based on the audio captured in the BWC footage. While use of the tool may start off as a free trial, Axon sees Draft One as another key product for capturing new customers, despite widespread skepticism of the accuracy of the reports, the inability to determine which reports have been drafted using the system, and the liability they could bring to prosecutions.

In 2024, Axon acquired a company called Fusus, a platform that combines the growing stores of data that police departments collect—notifications from gunshot detection and automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems; footage from BWCs, drones, public cameras, and sometimes private cameras; and dispatch information—to create “real-time crime centers.” The company now claims that Fusus is being used by more than 250 different policing agencies.

Fusus claims to bring the power of the real-time crime center to police departments of all sizes, which includes the ability to help police access and use live footage from both public and private cameras through an add-on service that requires a recurring subscription. It also claims to integrate nicely with surveillance tools from other providers. Recently, it has been cutting ties, most notably with Flock Safety, as it starts to envelop some of the options its frenemies had offered.

In the middle of April, Axon announced that it would begin offering fixed ALPR, a key feature of the Flock Safety catalogue, and an AI Assistant, which has been a core offering of Truleo, another Axon competitor.

Flock Safety's Bundles and FlockOS

Flock Safety is another major police technology company that has expanded its focus from one primary technology to a whole package of equipment and software services.

Flock Safety started with ALPRs. These tools use a camera to read vehicle license plates, collecting the make, model, location, and other details which can be used for what Flock calls “Vehicle Fingerprinting.” The details are stored in a database that sometimes finds a match among a “hot list” provided by police officers, but otherwise just stores and shares data on how, where, and when everyone is driving and parking their vehicles.

Founded in 2017, Flock Safety has been working to expand its camera-based offerings, and it now claims to have a presence in more than 5,000 jurisdictions around the country, including through law enforcement and neighborhood association customers.