The Aurora City Council last week voted to buy a piece of equipment for the police department through a different vendor than the one city staff proposed, and at a higher price, over concerns about the company that made the lowest bid.
Police have said that the piece of equipment, called a drive test scanner, will allow them to better map the ranges of cell towers to verify evidence they already gather through other means. The city is now set to purchase the equipment, along with associated services like training, from LexisNexis for roughly $195,000 using asset forfeiture funds.
The purchase was first proposed to a committee of the Aurora City Council in May and saw multiple delays throughout the approval process. Former alderman Rick Lawrence, during the public comment period of various meetings, voiced concerns about the proposal both because of the equipment itself and the company it was set to be bought from.
Aurora was considering buying the drive test scanner along with associated software, training and support, from Five Eight Group for $170,000. That company was founded by Michael Pezzelle, who spent 15 years at the police department in Mesa, Arizona, and worked on task forces with both the FBI and U.S. Marshals, according to the company’s website.
A report by The Marshall Project, published in partnership with The Arizona Republic and USA Today Network, said that Pezzelle was involved in shootings that wounded two people and killed five, including a teenage girl. That report from 2021 looked into the U.S. Marshals Service acting like local police but with more violence and less accountability, and it used Pezzelle as an example, noting at the time that Pezzelle had faced no public consequences for the shootings.
“That’s who you are doing business with,” Lawrence said during an Aurora City Council meeting in October. “You’ve known it. You’ve seen the documents. We’ve sent you the documents.”
Pezzelle did not respond to a request for comment made during past reporting, and also did not immediately respond to a more recent request.
Aurora asked for proposals for this purchase and evaluated the companies that responded based on experience, references and capabilities, Director of Purchasing Jolene Coulter told aldermen at the October meeting. However, that’s as far as staff members go when exploring companies, and they don’t research a company’s history or background, she said.
Ald. Keith Larson, at-large, proposed switching vendors from Five Eight Group to LexisNexis at the Aurora City Council meeting on Dec. 9. LexisNexis is the larger and more established company, plus it already works with the Aurora Police Department, so it is the better choice, he said.
Larson had said at past meetings that he had moral concerns about Five Eight Group.
Price was the only difference between the two vendors’ offers, as the city’s purchasing department negotiated with LexisNexis to add more training to its proposal, bringing it in line with Five Eight Group’s offer, Aurora Police Cmdr. Bill Rowley said at the December meeting.
The Aurora City Council unanimously voted in favor of Larson’s proposed change, but then Larson still voted against the equipment’s purchase. The final vote passed 11–1.
City staff originally recommended buying the equipment from Five Eight Group in May, but it was put on hold so the purchase could be put out to bid. From those companies that responded to the bid, Five Eight Group was chosen for having the lowest responsible bid and, again, the purchase was proposed to the Aurora City Council’s Finance Committee at a meeting in late September.
After passing the Finance Committee for the second time, the proposed purchase did not immediately move to the next stop in the approval process, the Aurora City Council’s Committee of the Whole. Instead, it appeared on the meeting’s agenda two weeks after when it would typically have gone before that committee.
The proposal went before the full City Council in late October, but aldermen voted to again delay the purchase. Ald. Carl Franco, 5th Ward, said the drive test scanner was a good tool but that a committee should “look at this a little bit closer” given the allegations made earlier in the meeting.
In addition to what he said about the vendor, former alderman Lawrence also raised concerns that the device would be used to surveil residents’ cell phones, in particular by seeing whose cell phones are within a certain area, without needing a warrant. But Aurora Police Det. Darrell Moore previously told The Beacon-News that the device is not able to do that and has nothing to do with individual cell phones.
A police officer would actually be using the scanner to map out the range of cell towers in the area of an incident by driving around with the device in their vehicle to test where it connects to various nearby cell phone towers, according to Moore. He said this data can later be used in investigations to verify cell phone location information.
Police already have the ability to get a warrant and ask a suspect’s carrier to provide cell phone records showing when calls and texts were made, including which tower the cell phone was connected to at the time, Moore said. The Aurora Police Department also already has a mapping software showing the coverage area of local cell phone towers, so police can use the suspect’s cell phone records to estimate their location at the time of the incident being investigated, he said.
But sometimes there are questions about the accuracy of those coverage maps, Moore said, which is where the drive test scanner comes in because it can connect to those towers as if it was a cell phone itself. He said police want to verify the location data to make sure the most accurate information is taken to court and to be able to answer any challenges that may come up.
Ald. Larson said at the October meeting that he looked into the technology because of surveillance concerns and found it was something that cell phone carriers themselves use to map out signal strength.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
