The proposal, which supervisors take up on Tuesday as a report rather than a vote, would fold the department’s technology into a single five-year contract that county procurement officials have exempted from competitive bidding.
By Staff Reporter
Eight months after Santa Clara County supervisors cut the Sheriff’s Office off from the license plate reader company Flock Safety, the department is asking the board to endorse a broader technology package from another vendor: a $50.4 million, five-year agreement with Axon Enterprise that would add artificial-intelligence monitoring of jail cameras, a real-time surveillance center, nine remotely launched drones and 154 new license plate readers.
The plan comes before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Oct. 20, as item 18 on the meeting agenda. The board is only receiving a report, not approving a contract. According to the Sheriff’s Office report, the department will return by the end of the calendar year with a contract that incorporates the board’s feedback.
What the package includes
The Sheriff’s Office already uses Axon for body cameras, evidence storage, records management, patrol car cameras and drones, under three contracts. The proposal would merge them, except Tasers, into one agreement running from 2027 through 2031.
The centerpiece is a Real Time Information Center built on Axon’s Fusus platform, which the report says would merge camera feeds, sensor data and alarms into “a unified operating view.” The jails have about 2,800 cameras that cannot alert staff in real time, the report says. An AI overlay called Vision would flag fights, medical emergencies, intrusions and objects on those feeds. The report says Vision would be used only in the jails, and that “no facial recognition, emotional detection, or other types of biometric tracking are currently offered by Axon,” adding that the office would keep any such function disabled unless the board approves it.
The center’s reach would extend beyond the jails. The report lists exterior hospital cameras, parking garages, county roads, patrol car cameras, license plate readers and drone video as potential feeds, each requiring approval from the relevant facility administrator. Contract partners such as the Valley Transportation Authority could later add their own cameras, and “private businesses and community members can also choose to register their cameras and pay to integrate their feeds.”
The bundle also includes nine “drone as first responder” systems, to be launched remotely and placed to reach county hospitals and infrastructure; Dedrone, a system to detect drones dropping contraband over the Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas; 154 Axon Outpost license plate cameras, which the report says come “at no cost”; and AI tools including Draft One, which drafts incident reports from body camera audio. The report says such drafts cannot be finalized without human review and that the office will consult the District Attorney’s Office before using the feature.
The price, and the deadline
Renewing existing services and adding the new ones before Dec. 31 would cost $50,370,862 over five years, about $10.1 million a year, according to the report, a net increase of about $2.5 million a year. Simply renewing the current services when the main contract expires in December 2027 would cost $37.9 million. The report says Axon told the county that waiting until 2027 for the expanded package would raise the five-year price to $61.7 million and would no longer include Vision, which the county would receive at a discount as an “early adopter.”
The county’s procurement office approved an exception to competitive bidding for a contract of up to $50,977,000. The waiver request says the department evaluated Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions and others and concluded that leaving Axon would require duplicate storage and “expensive middleware.”
The report frames the package as a response to the board, which on Oct. 21, 2025, asked for options to improve the safety of incarcerated people and deputies at Elmwood and the Main Jail in San Jose. It also says the package “does not add any surveillance uses/types that are not already approved,” and that updated surveillance-use policies will return to the board before any contract is signed, with generative AI features phased in alongside the county’s Privacy Office.
The county’s Community Correction and Law Enforcement Monitoring Committee, an oversight panel, recommended in August that the board support the information center. It also asked the sheriff to study privacy practices elsewhere, explain how generative AI would be governed and keep the office’s ongoing budget from rising.
Objections from civil liberties advocates
In a letter to the board dated Oct. 19, Victor Sin of the Santa Clara County chapter of the ACLU of Northern California urged supervisors to reject the information center, to bar AI-drafted incident reports and to disallow new license plate cameras. Integrating so many outside feeds, he wrote, “would amount to mass surveillance,” and he warned that it could become “one-stop shopping for ICE and out-of-state agencies.”
The proposal arrives as Bay Area governments reconsider police surveillance tools. In February, the board voted 3 to 2 to amend its policy so the Sheriff’s Office could no longer use Flock cameras, which effectively disabled the systems in Cupertino and Saratoga, two cities that contract with the sheriff for policing, KQED reported at the time. The vote followed reports that federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had accessed local Flock data elsewhere in the country. Several Bay Area cities have also canceled or scaled back Flock contracts, while San Francisco officials have defended the technology, KQED reported on Monday.
That history sets up the question before the board on Tuesday. Supervisors who rejected one vendor over data-sharing concerns are now being asked whether a single, larger vendor, with AI built in, answers those concerns or deepens them. The answer will matter beyond San Jose: the report says contract cities including Cupertino, Saratoga and Los Altos Hills could buy drones for the sheriff to operate for them, and Axon’s quoted price requires a contract signed by Dec. 31.
