ANN ARBOR, MI — The Ann Arbor Police Department is adding a couple all-electric Ford Mustangs to its patrol fleet.
City Council OK’d the $93,926 purchase of two 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles at its last meeting in December.
“The Mach-E is an all-electric, small crossover vehicle that is new on the market,” Matt Kulhanek, the city’s fleet manager, told council in a memo, noting the city is purchasing all-wheel-drive models for winter weather conditions.
The vehicles, which are expected to arrive later in 2021, could go about 210 miles per charge, Kulhanek said.
“As a fully electric vehicle, this purchase is consistent with many of the city’s established sustainability efforts including the Green Fleets Policy and the A2Zero Plan,” Kulhanek wrote.
The city has been gradually shifting toward all-electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles as part of its goal of achieving communitywide carbon-neutrality by 2030.
The city’s sustainability office is putting $30,549 toward the initial EV purchases, though the police department will be responsible for the increased fleet replacement costs each year, Kulhanek said, noting fuel savings will offset some of the expense.
“These vehicles will also require Level 2 chargers at an estimated cost of $5,000,” he told council, adding that would be funded separately.
The city’s sustainability office has a goal of adding 100 new EV chargers throughout the community in 2021, including four rapid-chargers planned outside city hall and the police station on Ann Street.
Ann Arbor gets $170K from state, DTE to install rapid EV chargers downtown
The new electric Mustangs are replacing two police vehicles reaching their contractual limit, Kulhanek said.
The city’s labor contracts with the Ann Arbor Police Officers Association and the Ann Arbor Police Supervisors require the city to replace vehicles used by the police union members every six years or 80,000 miles, whichever comes first.
In addition to the new electric Mustangs, which are coming from Gorno Ford in Woodhaven, council OK’d a six-year, $348,308 contract for new dashboard cameras in AAPD vehicles.
The agreement with Axon Enterprise Inc. includes the cost of new cameras and Wi-Fi offload server hardware in patrol vehicles and cloud data storage via Evidence.com.
Ann Arbor resident Adam Oxner addressed council, urging city leaders to make sure the city’s police oversight commission has a say on future technology purchases to avoid using facial recognition technology.
AAPD does not use or possess facial recognition technology, including the Axon dash cameras and body cameras, Police Chief Michael Cox said.
“Facial recognition technology has been proven over and over again to be biased and used mostly to surveil lower-income communities and communities of color,” Oxner said, calling it a powerful technology that, in the wrong hands, can harm the less privileged.
While the contract does not grant Axon the right to analyze the city’s data in ways that identify anyone’s personally identifiable information, it does upload all recordings to Axon’s servers and that’s a citizen privacy concern, Oxner said.
“It is exactly this type of technology used by police that we need strong citizen oversight of,” he said.
It’s good to know current AAPD practice is on the proper side of policing on the issue of facial recognition technology, said Ali Ramlawi, a City Council liaison to the police oversight commission.
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