Olympia Police Department might implement body-worn cameras as soon as July

Posted

The Olympia Community Livability and Public Safety (CLPS) Committee is  recommending the city acquire and implement body-worn cameras and in-car video systems for the city’s police department. The committee voted during its meeting Wednesday, April 27 to forward its recommendation to the city council for approval.

Olympia Police District Interim Chief Rich Allen told the committee thatnew legislation requires police officers to audio record certain events, like stopping felony suspects or juveniles.

“We put together a team to figure out what [technology] we will get,” he said.

The team – comprised of patrol officers, all labor groups that would get involved in the corrections, and someone from the police department’s information technology group – spent months interviewing three vendors who bid on the projects.

“We took all feedback and compared [products from three vendors]. Axon came out most preferred,” Allen said, adding the company was recognized as the industry leader in body-worn camera technology.

OPD currently uses Axon for digital evidence collection. “It significantly reduces the amount of training needed to implement body-worn cameras.

He mentioned one of Axon’s camera features which can transition from daylight to completely dark environments.

He added the body-worn and in-car cameras would be used for digital evidence collection. “It would save us a bit of money on the storage because all this is cloud-based storage with a security server.”

Its software, Allen said, offers a superior auto-tagging feature for videos so that officers will spend less time indexing videos. It also has transcription software that enables transcribing of audio portions of videos.

He added the company would send its team to train everybody and install the camera.

The total cost for Axon equipment with a five-year contract is $736,172.

The contract includes base software, hardware licensing, hardware refresh at the end of the contract, live-streaming software, and ICV install.

He said the OPD would use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) fund for the project.

Educating the public

According to Allen, the camera systems are the most appropriate, reliable and safest means to meet House Bill 1223, which requires audio recording of any custodial interrogation in the field and audio and video for interrogations conducted at the police department or jail.  

He added the OPD would dedicate an entire section to the city of Olympia’s website to:

  • inform the community of the policy
  • ensure that OPD’s website and FAQs sections are inclusive of the feedback received through the public engagement process; and
  • create educational material for distribution at community events and neighborhood meetings.

“Some of the information includes what to expect when approached by police officers wearing a body camera; or a request if you don’t want your video or face to be released later. We are going to cover all those things,” he said.

Allen said the entire month of May would be allotted for council presentation and resolution, public comment, signing of the vendor contract, policy finalization, and updating the CLPS committee.

He is expecting to implement the project by July.

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here