Oh, welcome to the webinar. I think, Erik, you're going to start us out. Yeah. We'll give it a minute here. All right. Thanks everyone for joining. Today we are going to host a webinar with a few of Axon's very important customers that have been with us for a while that we're going to hear from, and we'll open up the opportunity to also ask some questions via Slido link. Hosting the webinar for us and asking some of those questions will be Mike Wagers, Axon's Chief Customer Officer. I'll kick it over to you to maybe introduce yourself. Sure. Thanks, Erik. As Erik said, I'm Mike Wagers. I'm the Chief Customer Officer here at Axon. I'm approaching 10 years. I added it up the other day, and I'm feeling really old. I've been in this business for 30 years now, either public sector, private sector, or nonprofit sector, all focused on public safety. I got my PhD from Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. I've been a professor at a university. I've worked at IACP. I've worked at Amazon Web Services, building out their justice and public safety business. I've been the Chief Operating Officer at Seattle PD. Been here at Axon for 10 years. I'm excited to have a conversation, not just I'd consider obviously they are very viable customers of ours, but certainly recognized leaders across the entire profession. That's why we chose them for this panel, and for this webinar. Erik, well, anything else, I will go ahead and introduce the panel. We'll just jump right in. Unless you have any introductory comments, I'll introduce the panel. Sounds great. As we were thinking about how to put this panel together is we have Chief Darrell Lowe, who's the Chief in Redmond, Washington, in the Pacific Northwest. They come at this from different angles, like Chief Lowe originally started down in California. He's known as an innovator when it comes to DFRs. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about drones, and drones as a first responder. Chief Doreen Jokerst, she's at Overland Park, Kansas, got the middle of the country covered. She formerly at University of Colorado, and if you ask her a question about Deion Sanders, you'll get a very funny answer. I'll just spoil it there. She had no idea who he was when he became coach there. Overland Park's the second largest city in Kansas, and it's part of the Kansas City metropolitan area. She right now is in the thick of World Cup. We really appreciate her time because she's got a lot going on to try to keep all the fans and the teams and everyone else safe in and around the Kansas City area. We have Sheriff Michael Adkinson, who is a sixth-generation Walton County native. I didn't know that. He's been the Sheriff since 2008. Has been reelected 4x, which is pretty amazing. He's also different from Chief Lowe and Chief Jokerst. He also, in Florida, and for his county, is in charge not just of law enforcement, but fire, rescue, and emergency management. He has it all under one roof. He brings a slightly different perspective than perhaps Chief Jokerst and Chief Lowe. He's also, like they all are, involved in national organizations. They see not just what they see and hear and understand and deal with in their jurisdiction, but they deal with their counterparts across the country. In particular, Chief Adkinson is the Chair of the FirstNet Authority Board, which is a pretty important position. That is established by Congress, pushed by all the law enforcement associations to bring interoperability to law enforcement after 9/11. It just took a long time to get the board established, and then the board is in charge of, that Sheriff Adkinson chairs to make sure FirstNet does what it's supposed to do in terms of providing that priority network to law enforcement. We may talk about communications during this conversation. With that introduction, maybe I'll just get started and maybe I'll start with you, Chief Jokerst. Everyone probably, what they read and see on social media thinks crime is still out of control and going up in the country coming out of COVID and all the aftermath of George Floyd. Just curious, where do you see crime today in Overland Park, or as you talk to your colleagues, and is it still going up or is it coming down, and where are things when it comes to the state of crime in Overland Park, but also the United States? Well, thank you so much for having us. I greatly appreciate it. Like Mike said, my background in policing is from Colorado. I served in a city for 20 years before I became the chief of police at the University of Colorado Boulder for another 6.5 years. 26.5 years, in the state of Colorado and about 18 months in the state of Kansas. She started when she was 12, as you can see. Yeah. That's right. That's very nice. Crime is definitely different from state to state, and I don't doubt Chief Lowe and Sheriff Adkinson have different perspectives in regards to this from their communities that they serve as well. In Kansas, for us, and being just 30 minutes south of the Kansas Metro area, we're a very affluent community, 207,000 population. I have about 280 officers, about 100 professional staff. Our crime rate in our city primarily goes around property-related crimes for us. That's the things for us that are kind of on the rise and a little steady, a little on the rise, too. Definitely as you mentioned with the World Cup in our backyard, that has changed some of the things within the past month in regards to what that looks like. Crime for us has definitely been maintaining more of a steady factor for us. Policing and the expectations of police have changed over those years as well, and kind of how we look at crime and what it looks like from an evidence-based methodology and how we respond to crime has definitely changed as well, being a more proactive preventative model versus a reactive model, and how do you balance those two things out. I know, Mike, that was kind of a broad-based answer in regards to it, property crime for us in Kansas and in our area is definitely what we see more than a high violent crime city, per se. Is crime up? Overall, I would assume crime is down in Overland Park. Chief Lowe, same thing. How are you viewing crime in Redmond and the surrounding area, up, down, and what are sort of the major challenges right now? Like Chief Jokerst said, Redmond too is an affluent suburb of Seattle, we see a lot of property crime. Crime has been down consistently year-over-year. What we see here in Redmond and across the country is the organized retail theft aspect of things. The other part, we have unique challenges in the Pacific Northwest around the political landscape and an overall lack of accountability in other parts of the criminal justice system, which create or contributes to some challenges for us on the front lines, actually trying to keep our community safe. That was a very diplomatic way of putting things, Chief Lowe. Down in Florida, you see things a bit differently than probably Washington State, Sheriff. I joke sometimes that we wake up sometimes and go, "What is California and New York doing?" we're going to do the exact opposite. Sometimes. No, not in the policing world, certainly. I think in my area of the world, which is a tourism community where that's what drives us, it's extremely prosperous. Crime is down significantly since the COVID endeavor. I will say something, I'll bifurcate, because one thing I have noticed, that unfortunately when things go kinetic, the level of violence is significantly higher. The level of force is significantly higher when it does go kinetic. That is, I think that's a change because you have this long period, and I suspect it's the same for both chiefs would say the same, that when we're seeing it here, once we have that transition into that action, it becomes much, much more serious. You mean when you're engaging a suspect and when the suspect doesn't obey commands? Much more harm, much quickly to deadly force situations than we had dealt with in the past. I think there's numerous reasons for that. A couple, obviously the plethora of issues involving mental health and things of that nature. There are also some pretty serious firearm considerations and things of that nature. Yeah, when it does go kinetic, we lost a deputy this last year, From the time of the encounter till the actual incident ended was 45 seconds over nothing. That has been indicative of the kind of things we've seen here. By and large, extremely safe. Those things kind of stand in contrast. Now, I don't know where staffing stand. I know where it sort of stands nationally. Just curious. Anybody's take, is recruiting up, down, staffing up, down, and how are you seeing that going forward? That's always a question we get. Like our departments, have they recovered or is this just a new world of the staffing levels that you're at today? I'll throw it out to any of you. Well, from our-- Oh, go ahead, Mike. Oh, Doreen, I'm sorry. I was getting you going. I was just going to say from our department, I've been here about 18 months, Mike. When I stepped into the organization, we had 41 open commission positions. I'm authorized 280, having 41 open is quite substantial in regards to the organization. We have about eight commission position open, which still means people have to go to the police academy. As the chief and sheriff knows, by the time you hire someone on to the time that that person is out on the street, you're looking at almost a year in timeframe. The numbers are increasing, I say we're trending in the right direction, but it still takes a minute to see that out on patrol, serving our community in more of a solo status by themselves and forefront. When I came to Overland Park, Kansas, I did some listening sessions, meeting with different professional staff and commission throughout the organization, recruitment came up. It was really great. One of our police officers said, "Well, Chief, are you looking at recruitment and that's your issue, or is retention your issue?" That was a really value point because to me, retention does start at onboarding. We did look at our retention, I'm pleased to say that we're below the national average when it comes to turnover within an organization. With that being said, I still think I have probably 25 or so eligible for retirement. I have 25, 30 year plus employees that we should be celebrating and highlighting because they made it successfully to having an amazing career and leaving a lasting legacy. Retention, you can't talk about recruitment, I guess, without talking about retention as well, which means then you can't talk about those things without talking about wellness and the great things we are doing better within our respective organizations when it comes to really supporting ours people that support our communities. We are doing much better when it comes to recruitment. I feel applications definitely are going up. I would say I've seen a change in those that are coming into the profession. I interview all new recruits coming in and saying, "Why did you pick Overland Park Police Department and what resonated with you?" I definitely see a higher likelihood that people say, "It's your tech, it's your drones. I want to get into this. It's your co-responder units, it's social services," those type things. Back in the day when I saw more of the SWAT, it's your canines, and we still get those responses, but large in part, I get more technology-based interest and really working in more of a co-responder, police officer type role as well, and community engagement type role. I say we're seeing a change too in those that are applying to our respective organizations. Interesting. Chief Lowe or Sheriff Adkinson, seeing the similar things? Yeah, similar things. Unfortunately, Washington is 51st in the nation when it comes to number of police officers. It's a challenge holistically within my particular agency. We are as close to I've been here almost seven years. I have four vacancies right now, and I pass my recruitment unit and I keep saying, "I need four. I need four." Like Chief Jokerst said, it takes about a year from application to deployment, which is a challenge. That feeds into a bigger conversation around budgets and FTE allocations and getting people to understand that unlike other positions within a municipality We can't just run recruitment, have a person, onboard them in 30, 45 days-ish. It's a year-long process. We have to get ahead of the curve, because if we get to a point where we are fully staffed and we stop accepting applications, it's going to take minimum of a quarter for us to get back into the cycle because we use a centralized testing service. That contributes to some of the challenges. In fairness to our current governor, he did allocate $100 million for recruitment and retention of police officers throughout the state. As they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch. There is no such thing as free money. That was tied to a public safety sales tax, which feeds into, yet again, some of the political challenges and dynamics within the region around progressive taxing, et cetera. While there is hope on the horizon, there is a pot of money available. It has some challenges that go along with it. Sheriff, I know in Florida, recruitment retention budgets are, again, slightly different than the rest of the country. Yeah, it's interesting. I would say that we're fundamentally in the best shape that we've been in in many, many years. There are a couple things about to change, and I think some very extremely pertinent, which is Florida does not have a state income tax. That matters quite a bit in our recruitment. We do things like the out-of-state, a $10,000 hiring bonus if you come to us from out of state. That's supported by the governor and by most of the sheriffs. We don't have a state police in Florida, so we look a little bit different from that in that regard. I will tell you, there's a thing on the horizon where we are going to vote as to whether or not essentially eliminate property tax in the State of Florida. The effects of that could be, quite frankly, catastrophic. We're trying to figure out what that's going to look like. To Chief Lowe's point, there's no such thing as a free lunch. It's specifically written in that they're not going to cut the sheriff's or the public safety budget, but I don't know how that math works. That'll be on the ballot in November. If you have a state with no property tax, essentially no property tax, extremely low already, and no state income tax, and you can't pass a sales tax, it's prohibited to pass a sales tax to fund that. I'm not exactly sure what we're going to do. They're extremely supportive of public safety here. I'm just not exactly sure what this is going to look like if it passes. When it comes to budget pressures, what I hear in talking to you guys and across the country, the world has changed coming out of COVID and the aftermath of George Floyd and everything that happened. Nationally, crime is down overall. Obviously there's some variation. We do see property crimes in various jurisdictions on the rise or probably bucking the trend when it comes to violent crime. We do see recruitment and retention recovering, but recovering in different ways. I think as Chief Jokerst said, the new recruits see it differently than probably the three of you did when you joined this profession. Also, you have to respond differently in what you offer. As Chief Jokerst said about technology, we hear that quite a bit across the country. They expect the same technology that you and I have in our personal lives, like everything's just on our phone or everything just works. Before I get into the technology piece, just curious, how do you balance like, e veryone's under budget pressure, and we always get the question, like, "Oh, how's departments, where do they stand with the budget?" Florida's got this thing going on. I've never been to a sheriff's office or a state police agency or a municipal agency where they didn't say, "Hey, we're always under budget pressure." How do you balance that? Your personnel needs and everything that goes with that, which is probably, I don't know, on average, 90% of your budget, versus the increasing demands to deploy the latest technology to make you more efficient, effective, which has taken up a larger percent of, I would assume, the budget in your agency. I'll jump in, Wage. For me, I look at it, kind of a two-pronged test. Does it solve a problem that exists? Does it create an efficiency? The ideal answer is yes to both of those, that drives a lot of the technology discussion and decision. The technology won't replace people. It just enhances their ability to do the job, and it creates that efficiency. When we look at it, I know you kind of teased the whole DFR aspect of it. When we went down that path, I had familiarity with it from the agency I was at in California. Once it was brought forward here, it was easy for me as the agency head to move forward with something that I knew the effectiveness of it. Getting the buy-in both internally and externally then became the challenge. The cost aspect of it. When you see that actual return on investment, that efficiency, the ability to cancel a ground response unit to free them up for other high-priority calls, that is what gained, I'll say, the political buy-in, and that buy-in is attached to the purse strings and the authorization for contracts, et cetera. It's that balance, right? You'll never get rid of the people or replace the people. You just have to ensure that technology has a good return on investment. I assume, and you're seeing what we're seeing across the country. You probably know, but across the country, we're seeing the number somewhere between 20% and 40%, if you have a DFR program, Drones are responding, and officers don't have to respond to somewhere between 20% and 40% of calls. Now we're seeing negative response times, which is just something I never thought. I didn't know what the word meant until we started hearing it, where the drone is getting overhead before the dispatcher is even able to get the call out over the air to send a unit. Can I make a point about something Chief Lowe said too that I think is pertinent? Yes, sir. One of the things that I think agencies really struggle with is typically before they buy technology, they think about it for a year, and they go through the procurement process for a year, and then the implementation for a year. At year three when they finally get it, if you think about Moore's law being 18 months, give or take, probably faster now. They're hitting this rate of obsolescence about the time they take on a lot of this technology, right? They tend to be seduced by it. What happens is when they buy single solution optimization, they have a systemic problem somewhere else, right? You're going to have a downstream effect. Any technology that is multimodal, that it touches these different modalities, I think is where you're going to see the future across the board. We talked about AI, we've talked about some of these other things, but where it touches multiple either entities or sections in your agency, that's where you're going to get your best return on investments for efficiency, as the chief was saying before. I think that's the real bright future for me. When I'm looking at things, I think where does this impact multiple entities inside the organization and is it resilient to obsolescence in a shorter period of time? If the answer to those two things are yes, to go back to Chief Lowe's point, I'm sure Doreen would agree with this, that is where the real sweet spot is at. Chief, on the procurement process, it just hit me when just talking about it. You want to make sure, the sheriff was saying about. First of all, should have had a drinking game. Who would've thought that a law enforcement leader on this panel is going to bring up Moore's law? That's pretty impressive. Technology is moving so fast. Procurement can only move so fast as well. How do you sort of balance that when you're trying to get the latest technology that your officers want, and your communities deserve in terms of reducing crime and everything else that goes along with that? Yeah. Part of it is understanding the process and then also having good communication with your vendors. To the sheriff's point, understanding not just what your tech stack is, but understanding where all of your data is and how do all of those things interact. When you look at it in, you have to start with that, right? If you can start out mapping out your architecture and you'll have a clearer picture, it will make it much easier when you interact with your preferred vendor so they understand what it is you're trying to accomplish. They also understand the challenges that may exist, or equally as important, they will identify the APIs and the connections that need to be made to create those efficiencies. Yeah. I'm sorry, Chief Jokerst, I interrupted you. No, no. I fully support everything my colleague said. I think for me, I've been here 18 months, but in less than a year, we signed the largest tech contract with Axon under a year. That really is building trust with my city manager and our city council and our elected officials. Talking about the benefits for me had to be community-centric. My department in the past had had some challenges when trying to move things forward. I just always say, words matter in regards to what that looks like. Instead of saying this benefits the police, everywhere you want to say police, then either say public safety and community, insert these words. You can say, "The community benefit with having this technology is this." Instead of saying Real Time Crime Center, and this might not work in Chief Lowe's or Sheriff Adkinson's, or they might not need this knowing their communities. I said put information and make our Real Time Information Center community focused. In Kansas, we do get these windstorms, and we've had some alerts to tornadoes. I can say we haven't had one since I've been here just yet, but the Real Time Information Center has been activated on these storms out there and really been beneficial to our emergency management teams as well. I think for me, it's really talking about we are here to serve our community. How can this technology benefit our community as a whole? Which police is a benefit from that as well, and showing what that looks like. I agree, making sure it's more efficient, that it's not going to be obsolete over time. I just always tell our city council, we're building this plane as we're flying it, which means we're going to have to turn, and we're going to have to pivot, and we're probably going to have to change some pieces and parts out, but the plane is airborne. I think really having that innovative mindset too, and those people that trust you and bringing them along with you as part of this journey. We have such new things out here in Kansas. I bring our community members in. We had a tour of the Real Time Information Center. I'm thinking, ask any questions you want on governance, on accountability, on thoughtful oversight, on policy development. Ask any questions you want. I think the more offense you play, I just say the best offense is offense. It helps with those understanding and educational pieces as you keep developing these things out. Chief Jokerst, Sheriff Adkinson, and Chief Lowe have all been to Scottsdale here at our worldwide headquarters for something we call our CEO summits. Sheriff Adkinson would've got bonus points if he'd actually talked about Ray Kurzweil and the law of accelerating returns. That would've made Rick really happy. You did get it in with Moore's law. Chief Jokerst is out here in terms of words matter and thinking about Technology especially just what's happening today and how people were thinking about AI, and it could be scary, and you're seeing the protests against data centers and everything else. I've seen some really thoughtful police leaders about how they implement new technologies, including the three on the panel today, about how to implement new technologies in their communities, which again, can be scary and being implemented by agencies who have the constitutional right domestically to take away your life or liberty. It's a lot more than just what AI can do. One quick story on Chief Jokerst. We have made it clear that back in 2018, we put a pause on facial recognition because the technology just wasn't there. We said we'd continue doing the research, and we have. The top algorithms, by the way, that we evaluated in 2017, 2018, not even in the top 500 today. It's getting really good, better than humans. What Chief Jokerst pointed out, we're not really doing facial recognition. We're not trying to use the camera to scan everybody and trying to identify, there's Darrell Lowe, there's Michael Adkinson. You're matching that against a list. Chief Jokerst is like, "That's face matching, and that means something very different. When I talk to my community, that would be more acceptable than facial recognition." Without that feedback, we would've still been calling it facial recognition. Chief Jokerst gave us, just like all these law enforcement leaders do when we interact with them, we listen to what they say, and that's been super important. We can build the technology, but if they can't procure it and if they can't implement it in the right ways in their communities, it doesn't matter. Mike, can I just add something real quick to that? I think Doreen touched on that, and that is nomenclature matters, right? When we're doing these kind of things, a lot of times, as you were talking about before, I think we said off air, that the policies and the procedures need to be in place prior to the application of these new technologies, and that's where the buy-in comes in. Rachel Botsman, she's an economist, talks a lot about currency of trust. I think we've got this thing backwards. We should be building the currency of trust with the technology and introducing the technology with the policy already in place, not the other way around. I think that's a real opportunity to be better the way we do it. Yeah. By the way, a couple of things. We will get to your questions. Erik reminded me that there's a Slido link in there. Just curious, we are just like any company, moving fast on AI, rolling out new things all the time. It is mind-blowing to me, working in a company, to see how fast we can move. I'm just curious how you take it all in as a police leader, as a law enforcement leader, and then think about how to use those technologies when AI is just moving and technology is just moving so fast today versus 18 months ago. Well, I think part of it is actually leaning into it and understanding it. I think that that is a real void or deficiency with law enforcement executives. AI, that train's already moving, and if you don't understand it and if you don't embrace it, you're going to get left behind. Oftentimes that can be scary. Kind of to the sheriff's point, sometimes we wait. Nobody wants to necessarily be the first, because if it goes bad, it's very public, and could not be good for a community, an agency, et cetera. I think leaders need to understand it, to participate with the vendors to help make it better, to talk about our pain points, to talk about our concerns. Once you understand it, perhaps you don't do a department-wide rollout. You start with a pilot to test it, to ensure that it meets your expectations from a deployment perspective. Because Kansas is different than Washington and different than Florida, and while we can all use the same technology, we may all use it slightly different. In Florida, the sheriff may be able to crank it up to 100. I may have to start at 65. So that's the sweet spot. We as leaders have an obligation to ensure that we have the knowledge, because at the end of the day, we have to stand in front of it to sell it to our community, to our legislative bodies. Equally as important, we have to stand behind it and the decision that we make to deploy these types of technologies, and the best way to do that is to understand it, to really lean in and engage in the process. Directionally, I think you're right. Florida, they can crank it up to 100. Washington State, I was going to probably say 30% or 40%. I will give you credit, Chief Lowe, you're up there. Being an innovator in DFR, that we'll get to in a second. I see some questions coming in about that. That's a big undertaking to make sure you're doing the DFR program in the right ways where it doesn't get shut down in a place like Washington State. As I mentioned, slido.com. The code is Axon. I'll just jump into some of the questions early. Now, I should say, and I'll mention when I talked to the sheriff and Chief Jokerst and Chief Lowe, this is not a commercial for Axon. I don't want them to promote Axon. They obviously aren't trying to sell Axon. I want their honest answers. I'll ask the questions, and you can give us the honest feedback as you see fit. Actually, I like to hear where we maybe haven't done so well, where we can improve. We're always looking for feedback. I do want to make clear, they are not out here, they did not join this webinar to promote Axon. I'm sure they're going to give you their honest feedback and answers to these questions. First one, and maybe Chief Jokerst, because I think you have our AI Era Plan, but we'll see for the rest. What AI products do you use the most for Axon? That's 1A. 1B, how do you tackle rollout? Which we talked about a little bit, and adoption. Let's just stick with one, because I think we did as far as like what AI products do you use most from Axon? Currently, I would say a couple. I would say Draft One is something that we use quite a bit that just rolled out into our organization, I can tell you, I sat through every Axon training for Draft One, for TASER. I sat through everything to, number one, see how your trainers were coming out and training other department, what language they were using, what that looked like. It's because I wanted to hear it, so that way when our officers had feedback, I could say, "Oh, I know what you're talking about. I attended that training as well." Draft One is one that we use that I can tell you I was more restrictive when it came out as far as governance, as far as not opening up so many percentages of, does that make sense, of what they can type and what they can't type. It's something we have slowly cascaded over time to open it up or become less restrictive, I guess, is how I should explain that for the police reports. The second one, Mike, you'll have to tell me the name of it, but it's going to be when language triggers on a body-worn camera to prompt a review in regards to what that looks like, we have profanities and we have hate speech. What is that? Axon Standards? Correct. That is right. Yep. Axon Standards we use as well because you have all of these hundreds and hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of interactions with our community, there's no way that you can go through all that. Having a system be able to critique those things. Something we also want to do too is not just highlight, "Hey, Mike got triggered this many times, and here's what we're doing, and we need to help him." Where is Darrell doing an amazing job on this too? These performance metrics should not always just be looked at through the lens of negativity or punitive in nature, but also highlighting and expressing and congratulating, appreciating those when they do well. When we look at it, I always say, I get it triggers for this. How do we trigger it over here to say Mike's doing an amazing job, and how do we put something in his file as well to counteract that? I don't want the officers to think I bought all this technology, and look, she's out to get me, or it's this type system. No, these systems can actually be used to really benefit our teams and departments. How do we level set that within the organization? Prepared is probably the next one. When you say a zero set for DFR, our DFR responds 26% faster, I say, than an officer. That's just on the metrics we're currently using. Prepared comes in at the same time to our Real Time Information Center, so they can deploy those drones. That's something that we're using, I would say, quite frequently as well. All different. One's a dispatch one's a police report writing one's a governance and accountability one, if that makes sense. Yeah, love that about Prepared. I do think because they're listening as the call is coming in, then the AI can listen and translate if it's a foreign language, or just listen for keywords faster than what a human could type, understand, and type and dispatch. Love that. You'll be happy to know we're going to supercharge Standards coming soon with some additional AI features to make it better, one, in terms of coaching officers. To your point, it shouldn't be punitive. Were they or did they do well, where could they do better? Also to help speed up supervisor review because obviously that's a major pain point as well. That's great. Chief, just curious, and Sheriff, in terms of AI, and by the way, it could be questions about Axon features, but if there's other AI features you're using, I'm happy to hear about that as well. For us, similar. We have World Cup in our backyard. We're using the translation feature on the body-worn cameras. I just did our video for it. I have an officer that speaks seven different languages, so we did a video with that. Also with Prepared and looking at it. For each of it, we're kind of evaluating. We saw forms, to the chief's point, Axon Standards. I just went through a demo with your AI Era team for each of the platforms that are available. Again, it kind of goes back to my previous comments of taking that deep dive, spending the time, truly understanding what each platform can do, which ones make the most sense for us because again, you have to be a good steward of the people's money. While I would love to say, "Yeah, give me everything," well, we don't need everything. We have a prosecutor's office that will not allow generated reports. That makes Draft One not usable for us, so that has to factor into the consideration and the negotiation with the AI Era team. How does that look for pricing, packaging, contracting, that type of thing. There are other platforms out there that we use. We use a platform called ForceMetrics, and it's kind of an overlay for our CAD and RMS system. We have found that to be very beneficial for us, very affordable. There's other products out there, but again, you have to evaluate and so get the most bang for your buck when it comes to technology and in ensuring and then for Axon is Works with Axon, right? I mentioned the APIs before to ensure that when you do have the multiple vendors, and to the sheriff's earlier point about having the multimodality or the single ecosystem, it is really important that while it is business, that the companies play nice together in this, as the plug for Axon. The Works with Axon thing is really important because having such a big position and a big stake in many police departments, it is very important that others are able to plug in so that we can have some continuity of operations across our tech stack. Well, I just said, Chief, you are not going to I am not here to plug Axon. Now I forgot about Works with Axon, thank you for the reminder. It is important. We are committed to interoperability. Yes. We say this over and over again, I think this is why we really picked up a lot of steam at fixed ALPRs against some of the challenges that are happening out there with one of the competitors, because we believe that it's your data. It is not our data. You should be able to share it the way you want to share it and use it the way you want to use it. That goes with any other vendor. That's why we have open APIs. We love for vendors to plug in and for us to be able to plug in as well because you should be able to use the technology you want to use, and you should be able to use the data the way you want to use it. Sheriff, you come? Yes. It's interesting to me. I actually changed my mind when I came back from Phoenix in the way that we were going to inculcate this into the system, which was simply this. My thought is that too much data coming at you at one time is not communication, it's noise. What we started to do is say, "Okay, let's write the policies and procedure for a system-wide implementation of multiple different systems." That's what we're in the process of doing around our policy. I think what this ends with us, is using the example that you rolled out, if you remember, was where the DA had given the basic fact check on, say, for instance, domestic violence crime. What we wanted to double that with, we see it as a virtual assistant riding with a deputy, right? A virtual deputy going at the same time. We are kind of committed to this concept of the same person that may say that these are the elements of a crime that you need to make sure that you've committed in this call, that I can pull away from it, and by having our HR closed loop in that system say, "Reminder, you need to get your oil changed in 30 days. By the way, what's the agency policy on bereavement?" Now, I'm a Gen X kid. My dad would've said, "Look that up." "Go on the Encyclopædia Britannica and look it up." It's the first time that that totality of knowledge that you have the ability to ask the question and receive it. For us, it's about writing a policy to determine what amount of the report should the deputy sheriff write prior to doing X, right? Or my firefighters in my case, or my medical teams. What amount of things should be self-generated? How do we check against the review? We're writing the policy first so that we don't have multiple iterations as we add sections to it. What Sheriff mentioned, Axon mentioned, that we do these things called our CEO summits, and all three have been out here. That truly is how we think about our roadmap and building what we're going to build. It's amazing if you just ask customers what they want. They'll tell you what's most valuable to them and what will solve their problems, or versus what we think will solve their problems. The one that I always like to give the example on Policy Chat, it was a chief of police at one of those sessions said to us, "Hey, can't you just upload all of our policies?" Then the officer could just ask on their body camera using AI, "What is the policy on bereavement leave?" "I forgot my black shoes today. What should I do?" We would have never thought of that. We would've never thought of that. That came from the field. That came from chiefs and sheriffs and others who tell us, "That would be super valuable to us." We built it. A lot of the AI Era Plan came from translation, real-time translation that, by the way, we turned it on for every World Cup city and surrounding jurisdictions. Most of them, almost all of them, have Axon body cameras. We turned it on for the World Cup just so everyone could have it. That also came from a chief who just sat here at headquarters and said, "Well, I can translate on my phone. Why can't the officers translate on their body camera?" We're building things because of the feedback we're getting from leaders like, they're on the call. DFR. We had several questions about DFR. Let me put them together, and you guys can answer them how you see fit. One surrounds, is it here to stay? Second one, is it becoming more prevalent? Third, any challenges that you had, and we sort of touched upon it, but any challenges you had with community acceptance? I'll throw that out to all three of you. I'll jump. Yes, it's here to stay. It's taken the profession by gangbusters. Now departments are scrambling to catch up for it. Challenges around transparency. One of the things that largely made our program successful and it kind of became a national model was we have the camera pointed at the horizon while going to and coming back from the call, and that was the tipping point for my community because they were hypersensitive about surveillance, et cetera. When we explained that to them and also had the forward-facing dashboard. My running joke was for those from the Pacific Northwest, mountains out, when you can see Mount Rainier, I go, "We have great pictures of Mount Rainier. We should use that to offset the cost, make postcards." People got it, right? Like I said, that was a huge selling point. The efficiency for the officers internally because for me, I use commissioned officers as my pilots because I need to be able to establish probable cause or lack thereof in that call response. Taking a body from patrol at a time when we talked about recruitment, when you're trying to hire additional people, created some internal churn. Once the officers realized that, "Hey, this actually saves me from going to a call." The running joke was that the loudest voices in the building that were anti-DFR were the first ones on the radio asking if Air One was available because they realized a drone's going to get there in 90 seconds and likely cancel them from having to respond to the call. It became a win-win both internally and externally. Yeah. Sheriff or Chief Jokerst, any comments on DFR and where you see it going and community acceptance? I think it's definitely here to stay. Just to give some perspective, our city's about 75 sq mi. We have two hives, four cameras total, one in the north, one in the center. I don't have the south side of the city covered just yet. We did team up with some academics that are doing research on DFR because I wanted to show how is it working, and I just say there wasn't a true roadmap. I'm sure Darrell's using a little bit differently to fit for his community. Michael's using it differently for his. Although I was researching, I say best practices, really just practices that were currently out there and adopting what I thought made sense for Kansas. Everyone's kind of using it slightly different. I want to show that it's successful too. That's probably my bias in it, and so far it is. What data matrix should we be archiving now? What does that look like? Just teaming up with some academics to look at that research and development piece, because then when my contract's over, I want to replace and expand. That is something that we team up with a lot, kind of looking at the research out there and looking at it through a different lens outside of policing in regards to it. I would love to see it expand too. I am not a fan of pursuits. I would like to end all pursuits, looking at ways that drones can definitely take over some type of pursuit where the vehicle comes to its resting point, you can set up a better tactical operation that helps for the safety of all involved, our police officers and the ones in the car. I would love to see this expand even further, and I'm very thankful that our community and department are a part of it. As far as supportiveness, I would say there's always going to be community members that maybe fear something due to lack of understanding what that looks like. We adopted exactly what Darrell did on looking at the horizon to and from the locations. I don't have beautiful mountains out here in Kansas. Maybe some sunflowers and stuff. We did a lot of those same things, and we worked with community members to develop thoughtful policies and also look at a transparent data dashboard in regards to where our flights are going and everything else. We are definitely very much when it comes to transparency pieces, where we're allowable, I would say. We definitely push those things out there too. Well, I hope it's here to stay because I sold our helicopters, everything but the medical one, so it better be here to stay. Wow. Yeah. Well, listen, the practical applications, how they're actually used as opposed to people outside the use is significant from everything from search and rescue, where you don't have to deal with rotor wash down in a low vegetation area. There's a lot of practical applications. I will say that additionally, I think there's a pretty serious insurance application and opportunity to be used there. One thing we notice in Florida, particularly with hurricanes and things of that nature, is one of the major issues that you have is roof damage to structures on the way. Now we're in a situation where you can plug in a resident address and have that drone check the status of, A, the roof, B, the structure itself without the individual have to go into a closed area. If you're in the Keys or in my county, we're about 1,200 sq mi with 26 mi of coast. If I close off 200 sq mi of coast because of people want to know, "Hey, what's going on with my home?" In the way that you could ask for a residential check or a patrol deputy, they just want to see their structure still standing. There's some pretty serious insurance opportunities to partner, I think, with insurance companies to use that to make sure the integrity of structures and roofs and things of that nature as well. Yeah, I think it's got a real big future there. Well, Sheriff, you do have a fan listening because they just wrote a comment. "Thank you, Sheriff Adkinson, for keeping Seaside safe. We greatly appreciate your work." Not sure who that is, but you got a fan listening on the webinar here. Beautiful area. Beautiful. Similar with DFR, because we talked about Prepared, which is we acquired them back at end of last year. There's several questions about this, I'll just sort of put it all together. Where do you see AI-assisted call taking and dispatching going? It sounds like everyone is sort of sold on Prepared today. The features that where you use AI for call assistance, where you could triage calls, you could use AI for translation, which is huge. Paul's one story, we hear multiple stories, but maybe happened in your community where you had someone calling in outside of Baltimore speaking Mandarin. The call taker, the old way of doing business, you got to hit the line to get a translator on the call. Prepared, their AI picked up that the man said, "My daughter has been shot," in Mandarin. Comes up in English. The car gets dispatched. Rescue as well. They're on the scene before the translator actually got on the call, before they could translate it. You're seeing just amazing stories like that. I guess the question is where do you see AI playing a role with call taking and dispatch into the future? Is it like DFR? Like that's here to stay and that will transform how we think about call taking and dispatching? Well, we passed the Turing test, what? Maybe five years ago, give or take. If you want to talk about Kurzweil, right? AGI, artificial general intelligence, I think there's a decent argument that we've achieved that now, and some people argue differently. Either way you want to do it, I think from a purely practical matter, there's zero question that we're going to be able to parse and manage these calls significantly faster with much less error with using AI. It is absolutely the realm of the future. I always thought the Turing test was a fairly low threshold because now it is so much better that it really is becoming difficult to tell. I think with the prepared questions and the roadmap for it to move down, I think we're all going to be moving to that very, very quickly. I agree. Go ahead, Doreen. I was just going to say, I definitely think it's here to stay. I spoke with our dispatchers yesterday. They really, I say support and joy, the new technology that's coming out. I also met with our Real Time Information Center, since it plays over there. How is this going? They think it's a great feature. I get weekly updates on stats for both our Real Time Information Center and just our new tech, because I want to know how is it working. Is it working to the way we thought, and those type things. I definitely think it's here to stay. I think once it is really more ingrained within our dispatch centers, more ideas will come out to say, "How about this? Can we do this?" People are calling 911 because time is of the essence, so any seconds that we can take off to perform life safety measures, I applaud that. It seems to be really working well within our center. Got a couple questions about, and we did touch upon a little earlier, just about AI in general. Like we're seeing what's happening just in the world around us, sort of maybe apprehension around the AI, perhaps job losses coming, especially white-collar jobs in terms of what AI can do. The protests we're seeing with data centers and some states and cities pulling back building data centers. Are you seeing that apprehensiveness within your agency yet in terms of adopting AI, or your officers? Is there a split, older officers, younger officers? Are you seeing any of that within the agency, or are they saying, "No, give us more"? I think my-- For us, they want more. They want more. They're used to it because we have been so tech forward that they're looking for the next thing. Like I said, we have to balance ours against what our prosecutor will accept, so we're looking at other areas. Definitely in the Prepared side, I think that is the next iteration of what dispatch looks like. As far as the job displacement concerns, it's just going to change how we work, right? There will always be a need for people, but part of our jobs as leaders is that workforce development, is to train folks how to better utilize it. Right now we're going through an exercise around identifying a couple groups of teams within my department to identify some of our repetitive workflows, because I'm looking at a way to automate those, using agents, using various AI platforms. We have the either AWS or Azure GovCloud, so we can work in that closed environment within our infrastructure. To create automations, to use agents to create these efficiencies, while it's not going to replace the need for people, I definitely think it will perhaps change the workforce or the number of people because we can make the people that we have more efficient, but we also have to train them up in how to utilize AI and utilize these tools on these repetitive workflows and tasks that we currently do. Yeah. I agree with the chief. I think, if you're not evolving, you're becoming obsolete. This technology for me is complimentary. It's in addition to, but not in lieu of. I would say in my organization, I definitely had a couple tenured positions that were more, "Okay, let me understand this new technology." I get it. Every time a new iPhone comes out, I'm like, "I just learned the old iPhone." I understand what that looks like. More often than not, everyone embraces the technology. Knowing that, we really put thoughtfulness into training and making sure people felt comfortable with what that looks like and did kind of more of a slow, as my colleagues talked about, rollout to make sure everyone's on board. I definitely have some people that are like, "Chief, let's keep this going. We're excited. We want to keep moving forward." I did an internal survey when I got here, one just a few weeks ago because we're working on a strategic plan, I said, "What's one of our biggest strengths?" They put community engagement for our department and everything else, but they put technology. I can tell you, 18 months ago, my department would not have listed technology as one of the biggest strengths we have going for our department. I definitely think it's embraced within our organization. It takes leadership too, to also say, "We're going to roll this out. If we need to pivot, we will. If I made a decision I thought was great, and we later determined we should have gone left, then we're going to turn and it's going to be okay." I think too, just getting up in front of people and saying, "Yep, I thought this was going to be right," but now that I always say that the best policy, you write it with the best intentions, but then you're using it and you're saying, "Oh, now that the practicality piece is here, we should have wrote it more like this." Being able to say, "Hey, we're going to change as we go," and having that evolution so to speak, I think is really important from a leadership position as well. I say it's embraced from my department standpoint. I am certainly not a Luddite. No, you're not because you're quoting Kurzweil on Moore's law and everything else. You are not a Luddite. It's my mother's fault. She believed in a classical education. If you look at the average age of our deputies, of our firefighters, and our dispatchers now, these are folks that are absolutely used to the next iteration of change. It's really in the command level, being able to stay apprised of what is the next generation. One of the things I find with our folks, and we have to be careful at the command level not to be seduced by technology, and remember, technology is a tool, right? It doesn't reason, and we have to be thoughtful about the way we do it. I think as far as my experience has been with particularly line staff and the sergeant level is they are immersed in this from cradle in the grave. These are all. None of these folks are born prior to. Nobody ever gave them an Encyclopædia Britannica and said, "Look it up." This is really what they expect, and in fact, they're resistive to things staying the same too long. It's an interesting change from that standpoint. Erik, Encyclopædia Britannica is where you used to have to go. These were big books you pull off the shelf. You have them in alphabetical order. You flip through it to look up information. It was. Erik's of that generation, too. I learned something for sure. As we start wrapping up here, we got five minutes. I don't know what Chief Lowe, Chief Jokerst, and Sheriff Adkinson will say, technology's changing quickly. You're trying to keep up. Your procurement process, everything going on. What are the key factors or the key things you look for in a vendor? Whether that's Axon or not, what do you look for in a vendor as you make these purchasing decisions? Partnership. Being able to understand what, I'll say my pain points are. One of the big things that I share fairly freely with vendors is to understand the budget cycles of municipalities, that's not the same as the, I'll say the sales cycle, for a sales team. You could waste your time, because if you come to me mid-budget cycle, to the sheriff's earlier point, the reality of it is that deal is not going to close probably for another year because I'm mid-budget cycle. If you understand that, you can establish the relationship, understand what that potential customer's needs are, and develop the contract, the package, the everything. When they are in their budget process, that's the time. Also just flexibility. Flexibility around the financing. Yes, it is a business. There's a bottom line. If there is no flexibility and wiggle room, you're going to lose more deals than you're going to make. While you may make a deal that is not optimum for the numbers, you've now got a customer I'll say for life, or you have a customer with multiple contracts. Don't be shortsighted on the sales piece of it. Look at it from the relationship perspective and the partnership perspective. Sheriff, Chief Jokerst. Yeah. I agree with what Chief Lowe said completely. I believe strongly in quality customer service. I definitely believe in servant leadership, and I expect the same things from our vendors. I want a real focus on community safety. I want it on public safety. I like to look at mission statements and visions of vendors, to include Axon that go far beyond the products and what they sell, to show what the ultimate thing that is trying to be achieved. Quality customer service. I sent you an email last week in regards to that. I appreciate all the stuff you have done for host cities, Axon has done in sending out additional technology and equipment so if something goes down in an organization, it's readily right there to be able to help. Although we haven't had to open the trailer or do anything, doesn't matter. It's the fact that all the stuff is here. I just really appreciate that. I appreciate the quality customer service and really looking at it through a community and a public safety lens. Your email made my day. I certainly like all feedback and all concerns and challenges, and everyone has my email address and Erik's email address and cell phone numbers. When I get a good one coming in like that, Chief Jokerst, that made my day. Sheriff Adkinson? For me, it's probably a little bit of a Pareto distribution in that if you could achieve 80% of the things across the multiple things I'm trying to do. I like to be pragmatic about it. I think one of the things that happens is that a lot of agencies, if you're not careful, if you don't have reasonable voiced expectations leads to future frustrations, right? If I try to buy individual pieces of technology because this one's the best for this, and this one's the best for this, and this one's the best for that, they don't mesh together. They don't work together. I would rather have that 80% that works across the board in a system than individual superstars, right? In that particular modality. To me, that really is what I look at, how I understand that I'm going to add multiple pieces of technology that need to work together. I look at systems and how they're going to function. Okay. Well, to wrap up, one shameless plug. I do a weekly newsletter called "The Weekly Briefing," and I think all three are subscribers. Goes out to over 1,000 police leaders. It's not about Axon. Along with that, I do a podcast, and both Chief Lowe and Chief Jokerst have been on it, not Axon related, just about trends in the industry. Need to get Sheriff Adkinson on there. I can see that now. If you're interested in that, you can go to policebriefing.com. You can sign up for the Substack, and you can check out all the podcasts that are there. Chief Lowe, Chief Jokerst, and Sheriff Adkinson, really appreciate you joining us. I know you guys are super busy. We really appreciate you also being I was going to say valuable customers, but we actually see you as valuable partners, so we appreciate your partnership. With that, I'll turn it back over to you, Erik. I just echo those comments. Thanks so much for giving us the time. I think we, and everyone on the line really learned a lot, and we appreciate everything you're doing for your communities and the community at large. Thank you. Everybody have a good day. Stay safe. Appreciate it. Thank you.