Body Camera Manufacturer Posts Largest Quarter in Corporate History


WatchGuard Video sees 80 percent increase in body camera sales in second quarter of 2016



ALLEN, Texas, Aug. 4, 2016 - It has been a bittersweet time for WatchGuard Video, a privately-held U.S. manufacturer of law enforcement in-car and body-worn camera systems based near Dallas. Realizing an eighty percent year-over-year growth, the second quarter came to a close as the most successful quarter in the company's fourteen-year history just days before the ambush of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.



VISTA WiFi Body Camera manufactured by WatchGuard Video "In spite of our corporate success, it has been a somber time," stated Steve Coffman, President of WatchGuard. "We take our responsibility in supporting law enforcement seriously. Our job is to develop and engineer tools that provide the transparency needed to build trust between police and the communities they serve as well as protect officers' careers. We never want to see loss of life; when that life is an officer's, well, that becomes very personal to us."



$1mm per month in RD



WatchGuard's growth has averaged nearly thirty percent annually since being founded in 2002. With the public's demand for video evidence increasing, the company has expanded its staff by thirty-nine percent in the past twelve months alone. The majority of new hires have been engineers to further the company's extensive research and development efforts. WatchGuard currently spends $1 million per month on research and development to advance the video evidence technology used by law enforcement.



"Almost everyone today has a high-quality video camera on their person; to the point that we have created and embraced a culture of 'citizen journalists' similar to what we recently saw with the incidents in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, MN," said Coffman. "Why should law enforcement officers be asked to protect us and be held accountable using a camera that is inferior to what is sold on the consumer market? Their body cameras and video equipment should be superior and the only way to accomplish that is to invest in developing the technology they need."



Technological advances and adoption



The record-setting growth WatchGuard experienced in the second quarter comes on the heels of the release of VISTA WiFi™, a body camera that integrates with the company's 4RE™ in-car video system to provide multiple angles on a single incident. Over 100 agencies have placed orders for the latest technological advancement in video evidence.



WatchGuard body cameras have been deployed and are in active use in more than 1,000 departments across the nation. In April, the City of Houston began deploying 4,100 of WatchGuard's VISTA body cameras, becoming the largest city in the U.S. to deploy body cameras. In July, the City of Detroit announced their choice of body camera will be VISTA WiFi and are currently in the process of User Acceptance Test, a standard part of the procurement process in large cities.



"We are proud of our growth and the adoption rate of our line of body cameras, but our mission is far from being accomplished" said Coffman. "The Washington Post recently released a study showing of the 551 shooting deaths by officers in 2016, only 15% of them were equipped with body cameras. We still have a long way to go in providing the very best tools of transparency needed to restore trust and facilitate healing in these communities."



About WatchGuard Video



WatchGuard Video is the technology pioneer and market leader for law enforcement video systems and evidence-management software. One-third of the agencies in the United States utilize WatchGuard's proprietary solutions to capture, manage and share digital video evidence using the most durable, reliable and highest-quality American-made products including the 4RE® in-car and VISTA™ body camera systems.



To learn more please, visit www.watchguardvideo.com or call 1-800-605-6734.



Contact:



Jaime Carlin

469-342-8974

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