Brooklyn Park Approves $1.3M in Police Technology Upgrades
The city of Brooklyn Park is making an investment in new police technology that police say will help officers do their job better.
The city council recently approved a $1.3 million agreement over 10 years with Axon Enterprise, Inc. The deal will provide significant upgrades, including new body-worn cameras that are described as a “supercomputer” on an officer’s chest.
According to Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley, the cameras use artificial intelligence to help write reports from audio transcription and also offer language translation services.
Currently, police call a language translator phone line that requires officers to work back and forth with people needing assistance and a stranger on the phone.
“You can imagine how frustrating it is to go to a scene at a robbery and nobody speaks English and it takes you forever to navigate this entire thing when time and seconds mean things or a medical or somebody is injured severely,” said Bruley at the June 9 city council meeting. “To have that do it for you, that is the types of things officers have been crying for to be more effective.”
The upgrades will also improve the department’s records management system. Bruley said the current system doesn’t integrate with neighboring police agencies.
“We can’t interconnect with other agencies to see and share data with our records,” said Bruley. “That’s a huge hindrance.”
Bruley said the new records system will be fully implemented in 2028 due to time it will take to merge existing data into the new system.
The Brooklyn Park Police Department’s current contract with Axon was set to expire in 2027.
According to terms of the agreement, the new 10-year deal will also allow police to receive new technology innovations from Axon over that time span at no additional cost.
Brooklyn Park will replaced dated body-worn cameras with ones that offer advance AI technology.
New Taser Upgrades ‘Best De-escalation Tool’
Brooklyn Park police will also make upgrades to its Tasers, allowing officers more chances to be successful at greater distances.
Bruley said the new Tasers offer a 10-probe capacity up to 45 feet. The current Tasers only deploy twice up to 25 feet.
“This gives officers 10 opportunities to make that connection to be effective,” said Bruley. “The Taser is the best de-escalation tool that has ever been introduced to law enforcement. It has saved countless lives.”
The technology upgrades will also save time on video redaction services.
“There’s so many laws and intricate pieces of evidence that we have to redact,” said Brooklyn Park Deputy Chief Elliot Faust. “Rather than a human being sitting down and redacting each face, maybe of a juvenile that’s in a video that cannot be released to the public, the AI does that for us,” said Faust.
“[The officers] are excited about the possibility of huge time savings,” added Bruley.
Also See: Brooklyn Park Police Reel in Positive Connections with Youth at Fishing Pond
