Glasgow PD Wants More Body Cams

With altercations involving police and civilians making headlines nationwide, perhaps Glasgow is a few steps ahead of the curve. Glasgow Police Chief Bruce Barstad explained that while the department has been using cameras for several years, they have also embraced body cams.

Car cameras have been used for years here. They can help during traffic stops and other situations, but often the quality of video and audio can leave something to be desired. The department has also used other versions of a body cam in the last three or four years, along with different audio recording devices.

“It's the trend, but we started ahead of it,” Barstad said. “The courts are looking more and more toward that type of evidence too.”

With the controversy in Ferguson, Missouri, it's easy to see how the camera can help in sticky situations. It can help the police officer and citizens who feel that they may have been treated unjustly. Barstad announced to the Glasgow City Council last week that he was working on gaining a few more Taser body cameras that went along with a contract for evidence.com.

Officer Robert Weber has done much of the research on the cameras and program and worked with Barstad to negotiate a three-year contract. The cameras dock at the police station and the video and data are automatically uploaded to a cloud. The secure website is only accessible to certain people. Barstad explained that the new streamline way to download and store data on the website solves a lot of problems and can make it easy to share that data with attorneys, judges and even the media.

It helps data from being tampered with. It's also Bluetooth capable and can be accessible by smart phones. The camera, which is small enough to clip on a belt or strap onto a vest, has pretty good quality video with a wide lens that captures much of what the officer is seeing.

“It offers a 30 second delay,” Weber said.

It's constantly collecting 30 seconds of video, so the video actually starts 30 seconds before an officer presses the button to start recording. It won't collect the audio but it gives an extra few seconds that could make a difference.

Barstad said that when the car cameras came out they cost around $5,000 each, and much better cameras available in more recent times have cost around $1,500. The body cams that the police department has purchased are around $400 for each camera. They were offered a deal with the contract to purchase a few more cameras at a discounted price.

The major cost is the data storage on evidence.com. The cost is just over $2,300 a year. But the software and the flexibility might be worth the buck. Weber explained that attorneys can log into the site at certain dates and times to view video and faces could be block and other edits could be made, but each edit is documented and tracked.

“You can't accidentally delete it,” Weber said. “When you cue it for deletion it will hold onto the video up to seven days later and even then Taser might be able to bring it back. The things you can do are endless.”

Eventually the program will be available for wifi hotspots so that officers will only have to drive by a hot spot and the data would automatically dump and download the data to the site. The GPD finalized the contract with Taser last week.