The Batavia City Council recently voted to approve a one-year extension of the city’s contract with Midwest Public Safety for police body camera and in-car video data storage, as the city works on transferring its video over to a new vendor.
The city’s current five-year contract with Midwest Public Safety for Getac body cameras for police officers is expiring on March 31, according to documents included in last week’s Batavia City Council meeting agenda.
This past fall, the City Council opted to approve a new five-year contract with a different vendor, Axon Enterprise, Inc., for body cameras.
But, a memo from Batavia Police Chief Eric Blowers says, the police department is required to retain body-worn camera and in-car camera video for predetermined amounts of time, in some cases forever. The department intends to transfer video to its new vendor, Axon, but the transfer has proved to be a “time-consuming process,” the memo says.
In 2025 alone, the department responded to almost 20,000 calls for service, most of which were recorded by officers’ body cameras and in-car squad cameras, the memo notes. Some calls can result in “dozens of hours of total footage based on the number of officers who respond,” which is “compounded” by the fact that, for every police response, each officer generates footage from their body camera, front-facing squad camera and rear-passenger squad camera.
This has amounted to over 45,000 hours of total video stored in Getac, Blowers’ memo says.
So, given that most of the video that’s accumulated must be retained — and due to the files’ use as evidence in prosecutions or in court — the city is looking to extend its current contract with Midwest Public Safety to continue storing the video.
Blowers’ memo said that Axon offers a service to transfer the data to its cloud-storage network, but that the cost of that service is expensive, and currently expecting delays of over 18 months.
The one-year contract extension will cost the city $20,592. The expense was not included in the police department’s fiscal year 2026 budget, but city staff is anticipating that some expenses will ultimately be lower than initially anticipated, meaning the department is not expecting to need to make a budget amendment to cover the costs of the service. The contract would extend through March 31, 2027.
The contract extension was ultimately approved last week as part of the City Council meeting’s consent agenda.
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
