Toronto Police Service goes all-in with Axon body cameras and software

Canada’s largest municipal police service to equip officers with 2,350 Axon Body 3 cameras and an additional 3,000 licenses for data management and sharing tools through Axon Evidence.

TORONTO, Aug. 21, 2020 /CNW/ — Axon, the global leader in connected law enforcement technologies, and its subsidiary Axon Public Safety Canada, Inc., today announced that the Toronto Police Service (TPS) is deploying 2,350 Axon Body 3 cameras along with an additional 3,000 licenses (5,350 total) to its digital evidence management solution, Axon Evidence (Evidence.com). With Axon Evidence, TPS can manage and share digital evidence more efficiently with access to tools such as redaction, auto-tagging and transcription resulting in cost and time savings for the police service. This order was received in the third quarter of 2020 and will ship in multiple phases beginning August 2020.

The TPS deployment of Axon body cameras follows an almost six-year vendor review process. Through this extensive evaluation process, Axon demonstrated that its hardware and software services will deliver the following benefits to TPS:

• Community Relations: Axon body-worn cameras provide a greater picture of what happened in an incident as well provide officer accountability. With Axon Citizen, TPS will be able to collect digital evidence directly from the public and save it to the cloud-based platform. This will make it easier for the citizens of Toronto to share information with TPS and make it readily available for investigations in a secure manner.
• Cost Savings: The use of Axon Evidence, a cloud-based digital evidence management platform, will allow TPS to reduce IT infrastructure costs, resources and hardware. Axon Evidence creates major cost savings by enabling agencies to sort, manage, review, tag, transcribe and share evidence digitally so it can be available for both investigations and the courts in a more timely manner.

“Deciding to go with an Axon body camera program was the best decision for Toronto Police Service because the cameras are just part of the bigger picture,” says TPS Superintendent Michael Barsky. “The real value is within the digital evidence management solution which will allow us to manage and share evidence with ease, speed and less costs. I’m excited to experience the benefits that these cameras, backed by Axon Evidence, will provide to our officers and the community.”

“Toronto Police Service is leading the way with an implementation of connected body cameras and innovative technology for Canadian police services and we’re excited to partner with them,” says Axon’s Canadian Managing Director, Vishal Dhir. “This is a great opportunity for the Service to truly harness the power of the Axon network by utilizing cameras for transparency and cloud-based software for tools that will help increase efficiencies and decrease costs, that benefits the entire community.”

SOURCE Axon

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