They did such an amazingly bad job on their PR. Their best known products literally exist to keep police from killing people or violating their rights undetected, and instead of meeting the moment and explaining why their products should become mandatory, always-on, permanent replacements for firearms or ADVOKATE-style sworn statements they just kind of... pretended that misuse of their products was WAI and ate the consequences of that.

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MBCook 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well put, they had a delicate line.

Those departments buy their products. If they took that angle publicly I bet many departments would suddenly been much less interested in buying/renewing. Accountability seems to be super unpopular (which says A LOT) with their customers.

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debatem1 9 hours ago | parent [-]

I get it, but I also just don't understand why they couldn't effectively explain to the police that they were a for-profit company. The police definitely understand that!

Like, when the police were saying "we can't turn on body cameras all the time because it might violate victims rights" the correct response from axon was "we also happen to sell a very expensive victim redaction software on a separate SKU, until you buy that probably just want to let your officers use discretion wink-nod."

(I am maybe unfairly assuming here that their actual intent was to make money rather than protect the public from police abuses. I'd love to hear from folks at Axon if that isn't true!)

	▲	MBCook 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They could have just talked out of both sides of their mouths. Tell the public it’s to curb abuse, tell the police in private “we all know what it’s really for” wink-wink-nudge-nudge. Maybe offer up a few token cases where they caught abuse and the cop got in trouble or something changed as proof. Nope. You’re right, they ran right into that wall.

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mitxela 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

WAI?

	▲	debatem1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Working As Intended