Bell County Sheriff and Bell County Constables | The Axon body and vehicle cameras

Bell County’s camera spending grew by a factor of ten in seven years, and every step of it was routine.

Small purchases, one office at a time

Before Axon the county ran an L3 in-car and body camera system, which we know about only because in March 2017 the Court bought a storage array for $23,614.76 to hold more of its footage. In October 2017 Axon replaced it for the Sheriff’s Department, at $39,660.00 a year for five years, with a second contract the same morning putting the same cameras on the county unit the item calls MHMR/CRD, for $5,904.00 a year.

Then the constables. Bell County elects four of them, each running a separate office, so the cameras were bought separately too: $27,809.70 for two precincts in November 2018, $38,731.40 for three precincts in February 2019, then $8,730.00 for Precinct 4, $11,678.00 for Precinct 1 and $4,078.00 for Constable 3, the last of them inside the consent agenda. A sixth body camera system for $3,989.00 followed three weeks later, on consent, naming no office. Each is a five-year or three-year commitment, and each was approved unanimously.

By June 2020 there were twenty-three of them, and the agenda carried a quote to roll them all into a single five-year contract beginning that October. The item does not say what that would cost.

The same purchase, at ten times the size

Four years later the county’s annual list of contract renewals carried a five-year Axon contract for the county jail, the Sheriff and the Constables together, with a first-year payment of $450,000 and an estimated annual recurring payment of $553,008. It sits on page 7 of a 9 page agenda as entry “qq”, between a construction materials testing contract and a copier lease.

Nothing about that placement is unusual. An annual renewal list is where a county puts the contracts it intends to continue, and a reader looking for the county’s largest surveillance commitment would have to read to the fifty-eighth lettered entry to find it.

Every purchase, bought without a bid

All of these were bought through BuyBoard, a purchasing cooperative run for Texas local governments. Chapter 271 of the Local Government Code says that buying through a cooperative satisfies any state law requiring a local government to seek competitive bids. That is lawful and ordinary. Its effect is that no bid notice ever described this equipment in public, at any point in the nine years.

What is not recorded

Bell County published minutes for nearly every Commissioners Court meeting from January 2011 until 16 December 2019. Apart from two special sessions, we did not find published minutes for any meeting after that. So the 2017, 2018 and 2019 purchases above are decisions, with the motion, the seconder and the vote recorded. Everything from 2020 onward, including the consolidation and the five-year contract, is an item that appeared on an agenda. What the Court did with each of them is a records question, and it is the first one on this county’s list.