Police body cameras part of Dothan’s new integrated system – Dothan Eagle

When Sgt. David Schwab talks about the Dothan Police Departments new integrated camera system, he uses terms like functionality and user friendliness.

What this system is going to do is its going to effectively replace what we have currently, the supervisor of the departments technical services division said. Its light-years ahead of where we are.

The department is transitioning from just in-car cameras to a linked system that includes in-car and body-worn cameras.

Its not like were just adding body cameras, Schwab said. Were actually replacing all the hardware that we have thats 20-plus years old thats in the cars right now.

The police department received a $202,000 grant through the Department of Justice to help pay for the new system. The Dothan City Commission agreed to pay the difference of $837,000 over a three-year period.

Patrol officers, traffic officers and the community impact team a total of 135 people will have body cameras.

Randy Hall, the electronic systems and maintenance supervisor, said full deployment could begin in mid-May.

There is a possibility that body-worn cameras might be issued before the in-car camera systems get put in, Hall said.

The three-year contract for the new system is all inclusive.

It will include our technical support and it will take care of the repairs and do warranty, Hall said. Its like a turnkey cost for those three years, and at the end of those three years well have the ability to either come back before the commission and renew or look elsewhere. Plus we put things in the contract that, if certain things arent upheld during it, then we can look elsewhere before then.

Hall said that with electronics nowadays you dont look much beyond three years.

And the neat thing about these is that in three years they will even come back, if we renew with them, and give us all-new equipment, Hall said. Its one of those things where you dont get too far down the road and have something thats outdated.

The department ran into that problem with the current cameras. Schwab said companies dont make spare parts for some of that equipment anymore so if it breaks what weve been doing is buying spare parts from other departments that are scrapping their stuff, and thats not really a reliable way to run an operation.

The departments current system has two cameras in each car, one at the front window and one facing the back seat, and two audio streams, one microphone in the car and a microphone on the officer.

Schwab said the new system adds a camera in the officers vest as part of the uniform. It includes GPS tracking and an accelerometer.

We use that to know if the officer has been knocked down, if hes running, if hes not moving for a period of time, any of those types of things, Schwab said.

It has a map that tracks an officer as he walks through a scene. As the video is playing I can actually click anywhere in his path that hes walking or driving and move the video to that point, Schwab said.

Some of the systems functions are automated.

The biggest advantage for us is that the officer can do his job without thinking about what to do to gather evidence, Hall said. The product that we wound up choosing turns itself on without the officer really having to do anything if he is responding to a call. Theres triggers in the car, like when he turns on his light bar, that will activate the recorder. If hes suddenly in a tussle it will start recording because of the movement. If hes standing somewhere and he has to suddenly take off and start chasing somebody it will start recording.

The other big plus is that the officer has to do nothing to upload evidence into cloud storage.

Those two things keep the officers mind on doing his job and you dont hear about these stories where something happened that they didnt expect and there was no evidence, Hall said. It does a very good job of collecting evidence and a very good job of getting it to servers without the officer doing anything.

The body cameras also have an officer down function.

To my knowledge no one else in the industry has it as of yet, Hall says. It notices that the officer has slumped over or is laying flat for I think its like 30 seconds. It will then let everybody know thats on the system that theres an officer that is down.

The GPS lets the department know where officers are at any given time, and cameras begin uploading video to cloud storage a few minutes after they are activated.

Its not quite like a live-streaming, its not that good, but youre going to have your evidence very quickly after an event, Schwab said.

Video stored in the cloud can be shared with the district attorney, the city attorney and defense attorneys without having to burn it to a disc.

Right now, a case goes to trial, Ive got to burn a disc and give it to the officer, Schwab said. That costs money too. Weve got to buy those discs, weve got to pay somebody to sit there and burn them. We wont have to do that anymore with this system.

Fourteen of the body cameras have been in the field since the pilot program started in February 2016. That will help as the department and the vendor start training officers on the new system.

We have people on every squad right now that are basically experts because theyve been using this stuff for a year, so theyre also going to be great facilitators for us, Schwab said.

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Police body cameras part of Dothan's new integrated system - Dothan Eagle