Baltimore approves $153 million Axon police tech contract despite cheaper bid warnings

Baltimore moved ahead with a $153.2 million police-technology contract even after a competitor said the same work could have been done for far less, locking the city into a 10-year deal with Axon Enterprise through June 30, 2036.

The Board of Estimates approved the award, listed as SB-26-11338, for body-worn cameras, tasers and a record management system valued at $153,217,966.56. Baltimore’s purchasing rules say the board is responsible for awarding contracts and is supposed to choose the lowest responsive and responsible bidder, but city officials used a select-source process instead of opening the work to a formal competitive bid.

The vote split the city’s top officials. City Council President Zeke Cohen voted no, Comptroller Bill Henry abstained, and the yes votes came from Public Works Director Matthew Garbark, Deputy City Solicitor Stephen Salsbury and City Administrator Faith Leach, who cast the ballot in place of Mayor Brandon Scott after he left the meeting early. Mitchell Novak, a vice president at Motorola Solutions, told the board Baltimore could save at least 50%, or more than $50 million, by putting the contract out to competition.

City officials said the existing Axon setup made a different approach impractical. Axon already supplies the police department’s tasers and cloud-based storage systems, and officials argued that switching vendors or breaking the work among several companies would create integration problems and slow the department’s technology overhaul.

The decision lands inside Baltimore’s long-running police reform framework. The city’s consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice began on April 7, 2017, and the city and Justice Department said in December 2024 that they were seeking full and effective compliance on additional sections of that agreement. City leaders have repeatedly framed new police technology as part of that effort to modernize operations and strengthen constitutional policing.

The spending also builds on earlier Axon deals. In May 2023, Baltimore approved a five-year, $5 million contract for 1,200 new and upgraded Tasers. A December 2022 monitoring-team report found force incidents involving Baltimore Police officers had fallen by nearly 54.7% from 2018 through 2021, a figure department leaders have tied to training, equipment and consent-decree changes.

The larger budget picture raises the stakes even more. Baltimore Brew reported that the Scott administration’s fiscal 2027 police budget proposal came in at $656.6 million, up 7% from the current year and 29% above fiscal 2019. City procurement pages say Baltimore encourages minority- and women-owned businesses to participate in bidding opportunities, making the lack of a competitive process a sharper issue as the city commits public money to a single vendor for a decade.