The Winfield Police Department is equipping officers with body cameras starting next week. The department will have 27, which means one for each officer and a few spares. The hardware plus the first year of video storage costs about $30,000. The city will have to continue to pay for yearly secure video storage costs. “Really, when you start adding it, it’s the storage piece that gets expensive. And so we’re trying to plan long term. With the car side of it, the cars actually have three cameras, so the amount of data we’re actually going to start collecting is going to just really quantify,” Winfield Police Chief Robbie DeLong said. The car cameras will activate when their emergency equipment is turned on, and the body cameras will have a pre-recording to get the previous 30 seconds when the officer activates the camera. The video footage cannot be altered in any way. “Nobody can go in and edit. Nobody can go in and change it. I think it’s a secure motive of collection of information. And so our car systems are the same, and they’ve been that way for the last decade,” Chief DeLong said. Five cars should be updated to the new system this year.
Source: KSN-TV
