The Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, which patrols Saratoga under contract, wants to roll nearly all of its Axon technology into a single five-year deal that would add artificial intelligence tools, a real-time camera monitoring center, 154 license plate readers and a fleet of first-responder drones.
The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to receive a report on the plan at its regular meeting Tuesday, Oct. 20. No contract is up for approval yet. The sheriff's office says it will come back by the end of the year with a deal that reflects the board's feedback.
The price
Renewing the current Axon services and adding the new ones before Dec. 31 would cost $50,370,862 over five years, or about $10.07 million a year, according to the report. That is roughly $2.5 million a year more than today's features alone. Simply renewing what the office has now would cost $37.9 million over five years when the main contract runs out in December 2027.
Axon told the county that waiting until 2027 to buy the expanded package would raise the five-year price to $61.7 million and would no longer include the AI video monitoring for the jails. The county's procurement department approved an exception to competitive bidding for the package. Tasers stay on a separate contract.
What it includes
- A real-time information center built on Axon's Fusus platform to pull camera feeds and alarms into one view. Its AI layer, called Vision, would watch about 2,800 existing cameras in the Main Jail and Elmwood for fights, medical emergencies and similar events, and would be used only in the jails. The report says facial recognition is not offered and would be switched off unless the board approves it.
- Outside feeds, with permission from each facility's administrator, from places such as hospital exteriors, parking garages, county roads, patrol car cameras, plate readers and drones. Contract cities could choose to add their own cameras later, and businesses and residents could register theirs and pay to connect them.
- Nine drone-as-first-responder systems launched remotely and stationed to reach county hospitals and infrastructure. The report names Saratoga, Cupertino, Los Altos Hills and the Valley Transportation Authority as contract customers that could buy drones for the sheriff's office to fly for them.
- 154 Axon Outpost plate-reader cameras at no added cost, with live feeds.
- AI tools including real-time translation in more than 50 languages through body cameras, transcription, and Draft One, which writes a first version of an incident report from body-camera audio. Reports cannot be finalized without human review, and the office says it will consult the District Attorney's Office before using that feature. Deputies now log more than 1,000 overtime hours a year writing reports.
- Drone detection at Elmwood to spot drones dropping contraband over the jail.