The City Commission approved a contract Thursday to equip more than 100 Gainesville Police Department officers with body-worn cameras.
The city commission decided to approve a $610,000 contract with Axon — a company that makes technology and weapons for law enforcement — to provide GPD with 107 body-worn cameras and accompanying signal units in Thursday’s meeting. The signal units will turn on the cameras if the patrol vehicle’s sirens or officer’s stun gun are activated, said Gainesville Police spokesperson Officer Ben Tobias. The department will also get 190 Taser guns to replace their current ones.
“Part of it is we know that the public demands as much transparency as possible, and these are a vehicle to that transparency,” Tobias said of the cameras.
The funding for the contract comes from the city’s general and Capital Improvement Plan funds, according to the city commission meeting agenda.
Not every officer will get a body-worn camera, so GPD will distribute them to road patrol units that don’t already have a vehicle dash camera, he said.
About 10 to 15 GPD officers have already been wearing body cameras for the past few months as part of a testing and evaluation period.
GPD policy prohibits officers from turning off the cameras when interacting with the public minus a few exceptions, which include when officers are completing reports, having personal discussions with other officers, on breaks or on the scene of a bomb threat or explosive device to ensure there is no electronic interference.
“If, you know, they encounter a situation during these details that warrants the body-worn camera to be activated, then they’ll do so,” he said.
Footage from body cameras that need to be blurred for confidentiality reasons, like when interviewing the victim of a sexual assault, will be done only by evidence custodians, he said. Road patrol officers will not have the authority to blur footage.
City Commissioner Adrian Hayes-Santos expects some of the cameras and stun guns to roll out within the next few months. He said it was only a matter of time before Gainesville joined the growing number of cities equipping their officers with body-worn cameras.
“I think it’s what the residents of Gainesville expect,” Hayes-Santos said.
He hopes the cameras will hold officers accountable, reduce the number of false reports made against police officers and encourage residents to behave better, he said.
“I think when people know that they’re kind of on camera, I don’t think they will act as aggressively as they do sometimes against officers,” Hayes-Santos said.
He believes once more funding becomes available, the city will expand the number of officers wearing body cameras, he said.
“It’s my goal to ensure, I think, that every officer on the street has a camera,” he said.
Contact Jessica Giles at jgiles@alligator.org. Follow her on Twitter at @jessica_giles_.
In this Feb. 19, 2015 file photo, Steve Tuttle, vice president of communications for Taser International, demonstrates one of the company's body cameras during a company-sponsored conference at the California Highway Patrol headquarters in Sacramento, Calif.
