North Slope approves $3 million police camera contract

The North Slope Borough Assembly voted unanimously on Tuesday to authorize Mayor Josiah Patkotak to negotiate a five-year, roughly $3.05 million contract with Axon Enterprise for body cameras, in-car video systems, Tasers, and the company's cloud-based evidence and AI software platform. The resolution waived competitive bidding for the procurement.

The Axon contract brings in-car cameras borough-wide for the first time, replacing equipment Police Chief Jeff Brown told the Assembly is now 13 to 15 years old.

The new package includes automatic camera activation when officers draw their weapons or Tasers, automatic upload to Axon's cloud over the borough's private LTE network, AI-assisted redaction for public-records requests, automated transcription, and AI-assisted report drafting through the Axon evidence platform. Brown said the budget for the project was already built into the next fiscal year.

Axon is the dominant supplier in the U.S. law enforcement body camera and Taser market, and the inclusion of its full software stack puts North Slope on the same platform most large American departments use.

Some of those tools have drawn scrutiny. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group, has raised concerns that Axon's AI report-writing tool — Draft One — does not preserve the original AI-generated draft alongside an officer's edited final report, which advocates argue makes after-the-fact audit difficult. Axon publishes its own responsible-AI commitments and notes that AI-redaction outputs must be reviewed and approved by users before being shared.

Whether the borough's contract spells out specific transparency commitments around the AI tools — beyond Axon's defaults — isn't addressed in the resolution itself.