Community trust on record

CHENEY — Not long ago, putting in a body camera system for Police Department officers seemed to be cost prohibitive.

After a presentation at the Jan. 12 City Council meeting, that might not necessarily be the case anymore.

An estimate from Axon, a Scottsdale, Ariz. company that develops technology and weapons for military, law enforcement and civilians, shown to council by Police Chief John Hensley indicated initial costs for a system to outfit 14 officers with body cameras could run about $86,220 over five years. The estimate was prepared for the Liberty Lake Police Department, which is smaller than Cheney’s with 14 employees total, whereas Cheney has 22.

Liberty Lake’s policy outfits all employees with cameras, even administration, something Cheney would only limit to its field officers — 11 patrol officers and three sergeants currently.

“I don’t know the last time I made a traffic stop but I don’t need a body-worn camera,” Hensley added.

Hensley said the estimate is for the “Technology Assurance Plan” model. There is also a lower cost basic plan, running just over $59,000 over five years, but it does not include a number of features of the more expensive plan such as regular upgrades, software installation and maintenance costs – all of which would have to be picked up by the agency.

“Now the basic plan is certainly an option, but if something happens, I don’t know that we have the reserves in place to come up with 14K or 15K at a time to fix something,” Hensley said.

Hensley also outlined additional costs for putting a system in place. Those costs included $17,200 for the assurance plan, $1,650 for each additional purchase of 3 gigabytes of data storage space and up to $11,000 for Apple iPhones for officer since that is method cameras employ to download information to a department’s server.

A number of area law enforcement agencies have employed body cameras with their officers, ranging from Airway Heights who first installed a system over 10 years ago to Eastern Washington University — which began using with their officers in November 2020. There are also a number of reasons departments use cameras, including reducing questions surrounding officer-involved incidents, ability to correct customer service lapses and the enabling of officers to document the collection and preservation of evidence in real time.

Most importantly for Hensley is using cameras builds community trust.

“Because if there is a question as to what happened out there, the presentation of body camera footage will sort of break the tie, if you will,” he added.

Some of the financial considerations other agencies have listed is comparing the costs of providing body cameras to ramifications from having to deal with lawsuits and officer complaints. Those are areas Hensley said don’t really apply to Cheney – which according to department statistics has fielded just five citizen complaints in the past two years and had no lawsuits in longer than that.

Rather, Hensley said the department would employ the use of cameras to further increase transparency into its operations, accountability for its actions and being able to provide evidence storage. But their use also comes with additional challenges that haven’t been factored into the costs yet, including handling public records requests and how much would actually be needed for storage — the latter something that Cindy Niemeier said would be determined by state policy for retention of records.

“There is the potential for having to keep some of these for a long period of time,” she added.

City Administrator Mark Schuller said the city still needs to do more “due diligence” in collecting information on aspects of a body camera system, something Hensley was in agreement on, noting part of that research would also entail aspects of finding grants to help pay for it. But at least one council member commented that Hensley’s presentation had answer some of his earlier questions about the feasibility of purchasing a system for Cheney.

“You kind of, through research, put it to a point where it is reachable opportunity for us to take on,” Councilman Ryan Gaard said, adding he still had questions regarding storage.

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].