Cameras to be attached to NSW police

Chippewa Falls Police Chief Wendy Stelter told the Public Safety Committee Tuesday night that, ideally, her department could use 10 body cameras. “This naturally generates accountability among both groups – for the officer and the citizen alike”. But body cameras seem to be a special case for the organization, which is pushing for the technology to be adopted.

Officials say that this pilot period is intended to work out all the kinks in this program and that once they compile the data they expect to get full buy in from the other municipalities in Union County.

“We’re certainly concerned with privacy rights; it’s a hallmark of our organization”, Hall said.

Under a contract with the Arizona-based Taser global , each patrolman in the participating departments will be issued a camera weighing 3.5 ounces that attaches to the front of their shirts. The expensive part is storing all the video collected.

Body cameras for police has been a hot-button topic, nationally, for the past few years. He said many confrontations between police officers and citizens come during traffic stops.

The data will be saved for at least 90 days and longer if relating to an criminal investigation, Park said.

Police union officials said they do not support the body camera plan.

A six page-general order document for body-worn cameras was developed before the cameras were used, McCandless said, and it spells out when the cameras are to be on and when they can be off. Public access to videos would be subject to the regulation of the state Open Public Records Act.

The first five years of the program will cost $7.1 million.

Park said the body cameras and storage will cost on average $1,350 per officer the first year. The next year, the cost drops to about $600 for storage per year, per officer.

The highly publicized deaths of civilians, many of them young black men, at the hands of police have fueled calls across the country for officers to wear body cameras.

One of those was Mountainside, which will equip “16 officers, the entire patrol division, and two lieutenants”, said Mountainside Police Chief Allan Attanasio after the announcement.

The annual number of complaints against officers fell about 43 percent between 2009 and 2014 – from 156 complaints to 89 – even as the county’s population grew in that time, according to figures provided by the union.

Dickey said there are so many departments studying and testing cameras that “I am just going to wait and see what the research shows”.