The Newton Police Department is eyeing a new body camera system that uses a smartphone instead of a separate body camera, a move which could help simplify the implementation of body cameras in the department.
A few months ago, the police department purchased a couple of body cameras through Amazon to test whether they would serve the city’s needs, but after a few months of using them, Assistant Chief Bud May said the city doesn’t have the policies and equipment in place to utilize the current system.
“The City of Meridian uses these same cameras, but they are getting ready to get rid of them,” May said. “The biggest problem is that the cameras don’t last very long, and we don’t have the system in place to download the videos and store them so that the videos can’t be altered.”
That has led to May doing research and finding a company that provides body camera through using a smartphone. The system he founds can turn an Android smartphone into a body camera.
Once a video is recorded, it is geotagged and immediately uploaded to a secure cloud-based server. The officer can either enter more information about the incident at that time or go back and enter it later.
A representative from the company said the video is encrypted and cannot altered by the officers. The representative said the video should be admissible in court, but assistant city attorney Brian Mayo wanted to check on its legality before the city entered into a contract for the service.
One other benefit that the city could see from using this system is the fact that the police chief or a supervisor could login to the system and see where an on-duty officer was located at a specific time. The supervisor could also log in and activate an officer’s video camera to see what’s going on. If this occurred, the police officer would be alerted that his or her camera was active just like it would if the officer activated the video.
Because of this, the city could use the money it’s spending per month for a wireless locaters on the car and combine it with the officer’s body camera.
May said the cost of the system would be about $90 per month per device if the city wanted to use the recommended smartphone or they could download the app on Android devices at a cost of $40 per month per device.
The board took the proposal under advisement and will decided on it at a later meeting.
