The Oklahoma City Police Department will take part in a year-long pilot program for 100 officers to be equipped with body-worn cameras while on patrol.
“We think collectively as a police department that it will be an additional tool for us to do our work and our jobs,” Captain Paco Balderrama, Oklahoma City police officer, said. “Just the fact that we have video evidence can help us out on the case.”
Oklahoma City Police Chief Bill Citty said during the presentation to the Oklahoma City Council, the cameras would be turned on for encounters like during a traffic stop or an investigation of suspected domestic violence, and would be stored for open records.
Balderrama said the police department is trying to stay up to date with modern technology.
“I think we are ahead of the curve a little bit by being proactive,” Balderrama said. “We are not going to wait until it is all technology or we are mandated to do it; we are going to be proactive and start researching this now. A lot of people think that Ferguson or New York City played a role in us making this move, but it has been over years that we have been planning this.”
While the police department views the body-cams as a new way to document evidence, Officer Brandon Jackson, an Oklahoma Christian University alumnus, said some of the evidence recorded could deal with highly sensitive subjects.
“There is a lot of times where I have to deal with calls where I have dead bodies,” Jackson said. “How do you incorporate who is allowed to see that? Victims of sexual assault or rape, I take those calls. Especially children that are victims of crimes, I feel like there are some things that should not be recorded. Like I said, 90 percent of my calls are domestic violence or disturbance type calls so I feel like it is a touchy subject because there is just a lot of things that the everyday person just wants to keep private in their life.”
Oklahoma Christian campus police hope to use what Oklahoma City learns from the program as a frame of reference for their own advancement.
“We small agencies look to bigger agencies to break the ground for new and innovative techniques in law enforcement,” Larry Fields, Oklahoma Christian’s acting chief of police, said. “That is what we are going to do, we are going to take a look and see an approach to [the body-cams] and see what their findings are.”
One drawback for campus police to immediately follow suit with body-cams is cost.
“It is very cost prohibitive for small agencies to actually put body cameras on each individual officer,” Fields said. “Life safety issues are the priority for us. That is what we have to go with first.”
The financial concerns of the body-cameras is an issue with Oklahoma City as well.
“I think there are better options,” Brad May, Oklahoma City police officer, said. “Personally, I would rather see them spending money on putting two officers in every car. I think the body-cams are going to be a big financial burden and probably have unexpected cost.”
The police department plans on hiring four employees to manage the videos and the open records to help ease the time-consuming process of downloading and managing the video data.
“I know of one agency, the cameras that they use, it takes 20 seconds for every minute they have got to download,” May said. “If you have a large department working, you are going to have to pull that many people out of the streets just so they can start downloading all the [data] from [the body cameras].”
Citty said officers have been generally supportive of the body-cams and hopes this is a good next step for the police’s job of protecting citizens. The program that will be evaluated for effectiveness after one year.
0
0
Be First to Comment