Ohio Police Parking Garage Patrol Robot: $128,080 and Zero Arrests

A garage that needs eyes on it at all hours

Parking garages are hard ground for any patrol. They run several levels deep, hide blind corners behind concrete columns, and draw foot traffic at hours when a human patrol cannot be everywhere at once. For a mid-sized Ohio city police department, the structure was a place where people wanted to feel watched over, and where a visible presence is difficult to sustain on foot alone.

The department's question was narrower and more practical. Could a patrol robot cover the structure on a fixed schedule, and what would that coverage cost across a full year? Buyers in this position often get the first answer quickly and the second answer too late.

• Coverage: which levels, entrances and blind corners the robot must reach
• Cost: the full annual figure, including service, not only the unit price
• Success: the measures agreed before the contract starts, not after

One garage, one contract and a single year

The department contracted a patrol robot for the parking garage and kept the scope on that single structure. A narrow first deployment is easier to explain to officers, to the people who use the garage and to the budget office, and it keeps the cost tied to one place.

The robot patrolled the garage under a contract with the robot supplier for one year. At the end of that year the department retired the robot, and the pilot closed with the cost and the outcome counts it had produced.

• Limit the first deployment to one parking structure
• Contract the robot supplier for a full year of patrol service
• Keep the robot on its patrol route for the whole term
• Retire the robot at year end and review the result

What one year returned

Across the year, the department paid $128,080 for the services. In that same period the patrols produced no arrests, no criminal cases and no tickets. The spend bought a visible presence in the garage, but none of the enforcement outputs a police department normally counts.

A cost per outcome cannot be worked out from zeros, so the year reads better as a price check than as a performance score. Arrest and citation counts also do not measure deterrence, which is often what buyers hope a patrol robot will add. Decide before signing whether deterrence is the product being paid for, and how it will be measured.

The department retired the robot after that year, and the cost and the zeros are what the decision now rests on.

Pricing a patrol robot against what it must deliver

Service Robot Co. is a full-service, OEM-neutral commercial robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robots across manufacturers, then finance, deploy, integrate, train and service every unit through a nationwide US engineer network, so one partner handles the whole lifecycle. For a security patrol robot, that work starts with a site assessment and a written statement of what the robot must deliver, before any model is chosen.

We lease robots only, on a 3-year lease with one fixed payment quoted after the site assessment, so the monthly figure reflects the actual site and not a guess. Robot leasing for business works best when the buyer asks for the full annual cost, the service plan behind it and the measures that will define success. Ask us for those three things, and ask every other vendor the same.