The Newton Police Department is looking into a smartphone app that could serve as body cameras for the police department.
At a recent meeting, Assistant Chief Bud May demonstrated the app, which is used by Android phones only, of how the body cameras work. Basically, it works just like a regular body camera, but instead of having to download the video to a storage device, it’s automatically uploaded to a cloud-based server where it cannot be tampered with.
This kind of a system makes sense, as many people have already used their smartphones to capture moments of arrests and other incidents to show what kind of force police officers were using. So why not use the smartphones of police officers to do the same thing?
One of the advantages of using this type of system is that departments no longer need to purchase a separate body camera. The smartphone has a camera and is now being used to record for the police officer.
Another is that the video transfer takes place almost immediately using the existing cellular data service or over WiFi. That means the department can be more open and transparent about its videos because the videos are automatically geotagged, and it’s nearly impossible for the videos to manipulated.
A service like that certainly needs to be looked at because of the issues facing police officers. Body cameras are a way of life for police officers now. Every department needs them, but smaller departments like Newton aren’t able to make the investment to provide the servers and hard drives to maintain a normal body camera system. Using the smartphones might be the way to best implement body cameras.
