Long-time Slashdot reader v3rgEz shares an article from MuckRock:
The deal Fontana Police Department struck with Axon sounded simple enough: a trial of five inexpensive body cameras and, for each of them, a Professional subscription to the company’s cloud storage system.
When the California city decided to use a different vendor years later, however, it found itself stuck continuing to pay $4,000 per year for an unused service. Exiting the contract, the department was told, could tarnish the city’s credit rating — even though the contract included a “termination for convenience” clause to avoid just that situation.
A police department lieutenant tells the site that they ultimately spent over $8,000 for the cloud subscription which they’d already stopped using. (Last year Axon made $160 million from the recurring payments for its data-storage products.)
The article also notes that Axon (the company formerly known as Taser, the stun gun manufacturers) now has “some form of customer relationship with 17,000 of the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S., and it’s actively working to grow its international customer base, making it one of the most ubiquitous providers of police technology.”
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot