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From training to trial: how the Axon Ecosystem assists throughout the entire process

The Axon Ecosystem is a connected network of hardware, software and partner products that work together to improve public safety. Axon’s connected solutions can help law enforcement officers work more safely and efficiently.

The ecosystem includes many different applications and devices, and we believe that one of the best ways to show how they are all connected is through story. In this article, we’re going to walk-through a hypothetical event and you will imagine what it is like to be an officer in this event.

For the scenario, let’s suppose it takes place during an annual festival in your town, and your agency is providing security for the event. 

This article is adopted from one of our most popular sessions at Axon Week. You can watch the session for yourself here, or read on to imagine what the experience would be like for yourself.

Preparing for the festival: train for anything

Axon can help train your officers and set them up for success. Some of the ways in which we prepare agencies for a variety of scenarios include:

Let’s dive into Axon VR a bit more. It’s a versatile platform that you can use anytime, anywhere, without needing a PC, complex tracking gear, or a dedicated training area. That makes it really easy to use this tech to ensure all security staff are well-trained before the event.

If the event is big enough, you may be bringing officers in from other agencies, and Axon VR Training prepares officers for complex real-world scenarios using immersive content that enhances performance, critical thinking and de-escalation skills.

Axon’s VR Community Engagement Training is all about building skills, empathy, and de-escalation techniques. Much of the content would be ideal for encounters with attendees, people in crisis, and anyone experiencing a mental health episode - scenarios you might run into at an annual festival.

We have scenarios covering several mental health topics and other key areas like English as a Second Language, Destruction of Property, Domestic Violence, and Combative Subjects.



It’s not just community engagement training, Axon VR is the most efficient, cost-effective method to train on TASER energy weapons. Simulator Training immerses trainees into a virtual range designed to enhance proficiency with TASER energy weapons. These exercises enhance speed, accuracy and confidence under stress – again all of these are possible situations an officer would face at the festival.

Thanks to the training, your officers will already be familiar with best practices and how to leverage each part of the Axon ecosystem to its full potential. 

During the festival: respond and protect 

During the festival, a random drunk attendee gets into an altercation with another attendee. He punches that person in the face, knocking him down.

Many concerned citizens have recorded the fight on their cell phones. Someone calls 911 and asks for the police and an officer arrives at the scene.

If you’re that officer, the first thing you want to do is de-escalate the situation before the alcohol-fueled crowd gets out of hand. You need easy-to-use tools that work together to help you handle the situation.

On your way to the event, command staff can see your location and look at your real time body-worn camera feed through Axon Fusus. 

This solution creates a common operating picture for law enforcement, in which you can receive instructions from command staff and be provided backup if necessary. 

Axon Fusus is a technology-agnostic product lets you live stream or view data from just about anywhere, including Axon body-worn cameras, fleet cameras, and drone feeds via Axon Air. Data can be uploaded from unlimited disparate sources, including ALPR (Automated License Plate Recognition), which is built into all Axon Fleet 3 cameras. 

Suppose you arrive on the scene and find the two individuals are still fighting, and the fight is getting bad. Neither person appears to have a weapon, and you choose to use your TASER 10 to de-escalate the situation.

When the two individuals hear you shouting and the loud warning alert from the TASER 10, they stop fighting. One of them runs off, while the other one collapses.

Rather than chasing the suspect who ran, you choose to provide medical aide to the injured person. You run to your vehicle to grab your Zoll trauma kit in order to address the situation and help the victim. As you are assisting the injured person, your body-worn camera is accessed by your agency who is then able to call for additional help and EMS. 
Although the suspect has fled, he was also identified on your body-worn camera, and the movements of the suspect can easily be tracked via the camera network connected to the Fusus real-time crime center.

Although the suspect makes it into his car and leaves, his license plate was identified and an ALPR alert was set-up. If a drone was in the area, it could even be deployed to follow the driver until another officer was able to stop the suspect and arrest him.

During the festival: capture and preserve truth

It’s important to capture evidence in a factual, accurate way that documents and maintains a truthful record of what happens and your responses. Officers need tools that can let them get the job done while maintaining focus on maintaining peace and safety.

This starts with the Axon Body 4, which has been recording the whole time. As the officer, you started recording before you arrived on the scene because you knew you were walking into a fight. Even if you forgot, however, the Signal technology inside the TASER 10 would automatically activate your body-worn camera and any other officers who were nearby.


Once the injured person has been given the medical support they need, you start asking witnesses about what happened. They provide a couple different versions of the same story, and everything is captured on your body-worn camera.

One of the witnesses mentioned a tattoo on the suspect’s arm that is popular with one of the local gangs. Several people volunteer that they have footage of the fight recorded on their smartphone, and now you need to collect their recordings before they leave the scene.

Fortunately, you’ve got access to Community Request on the Axon App, which makes it easy to obtain evidence from festival attendees who saw the altercation first hand. With Community Request, witnesses receive an upload link on their smartphone and then can upload their digital evidence directly into Axon Evidence.

Not only is this process easier, but it is far more forensically sound. They can upload the original file and, unlike with texting or emailing video files, nothing will be compressed. The audit trail begins immediately, and it can be loaded into the right case with ease.

One of your fellow officers got an ALPR hit with their Fleet 3 camera and was able to successfully take the suspect into custody. The arrest was recorded on Axon cameras and will provide additional evidence for the case. All footage from the Axon cameras will load automatically into Axon’s cloud-based DEMS, Axon Evidence.

After the festival: unify and share your digital evidence

Axon Evidence is far more than a place where you store your BWC recordings. Instead, it is the place where you can bring all of your digital evidence together in one single location. Several key features make this possible:

  • Unlimited 3rd party storage means you don’t have to worry about data limits or unpredictable storage costs

  • Ridiculously fast upload speeds with Upload XT make it easy to get everything uploaded

  • Third Party video playback can recognize and accurately play thousands of different proprietary formats

  • Integrations with Fusus and our partners make it easy to import evidence from a variety of sources

Community Request effectively imports evidence that is shared by community members



Once you’ve got all your evidence in one place, there are several benefits that Axon Evidence provides that will help you expedite your investigation. For instance, you may remember how one of the witnesses mentioned that the suspect was part of a local gang.

Rather than watching 2-hours worth of body-worn footage, you can leverage a tool like Axon Auto-Transcribe and fast evidence review to search and instantly find the moment in your recording where the gang was mentioned.

Want to find more footage? You can use the Transcript Keyword Search tool to find every video you have access to within Axon Evidence that mentions the same gang. As you sift through the results, you find additional video of the same suspect causing a fight at a local gas station and can now add that content to the case.

You can also leverage Redaction Assistant to blur the faces of witnesses during the fight or mute any key pieces of audio. Auto-tagging makes it easier to organize your files into a single case.

Multi-cam allows you to sync and play multiple body-worn videos side-by-side. There are many different features and benefits inside of Axon Evidence when managing your digital evidence, and the future will bring even more exciting innovations.

Suppose your agency needs to share all the evidence from this case with your local prosecutor. First, here’s the good news: You won’t need to burn any DVDs or copy evidence onto external drives and deliver your evidence in person.

With Axon Evidence, once you have all your evidence in one place, you can easily share all your digital evidence with the courts. The process is secure, fast and much easier. Should you uncover additional evidence, it’s easy to add it to the case and share that in the same way with your prosecutor.

If the case ends up going to court and you get called in to testify about video evidence, then you’ve got the best tool for showcasing video in court available: Axon Investigate. Axon Investigate is designed and maintained by forensic video analysts who testify in court about video, it eliminates technical hurdles and preserves the integrity of the evidence. The integration with Axon Evidence, enhanced mapping capabilities, ability to sync and stitch videos, and the new court package feature make it easy build your case and play it on any PC without needing internet. 

Want to learn more? Check out how Axon helps with digital evidence management.

After the festival: report with clarity 

Some officers spend as much as 40 percent of their time doing paperwork. Some officers even take work home because they can’t get it done during their regular shift. Paperwork takes up a lot of time, and many officers feel like it is a burden.

Fortunately, since you recorded the incident and the interviews with your body-worn camera, you can save yourself a ton of time by using Draft One to draft your first report.

As soon as you stopped recording, the audio from your recording loaded into the cloud and was auto-transcribed. Within five minutes, you will be able to leverage AI to draft a report with a single click.

Once the report is drafted, it is now yours to edit and ensure everything is accurate. In fact, Draft One was designed with multiple safe guards that ensure you will actually review and make edits to the text.

For instance, we turned the creativity way down in Draft One - it won’t speculate about details. When the tool believes more information is needed, it will ask you to [INSERT more details] and won’t let you submit the report until every [INSERT] statement has been addressed.

Ultimately you as the officer have to sign off on the final report - even if Draft One got it started, you are responsible for finishing it and owning the content in the report. Once the report narrative is complete, you can copy and paste it into your existing RMS, or you can easily drop it into Axon Records.

You can see a live demo of Draft One in the Axon Week session at the top of this page, or you can hear about the impact of Draft One from one of our earliest customers below:


The Axon Ecosystem makes it easy to report on anything with several different tools:

Once the event is over and the reports are complete, your agency will have tons of useful information about your agency’s performance. With access to police reports, data dashboards and community feedback, your agency can celebrate the work they did well and identify opportunities for improvement. 

What’s next? Keep growing

The entire ecosystem is connected and designed to help you and your agency to keep growing. The learnings from your reports can help inform training, better equipping officers for the next large event where they may need to respond and protect, capture and preserve truth, unify and share evidence, and report on anything.

Here at Axon, we are on a mission to protect life. Our connected suite of software, hardware and partner products help keep officers and the communities they serve safer. 

If you’d like to learn more about the ecosystem, or any of the specific solutions we mentioned in this article, don’t hesitate to contact us.