While local law enforcement officers said they support the inclusion of body cameras for their respective agencies, they agreed that budgetary restrictions would make the endeavor difficult, if not impossible.
A hearing between members of the state House and Senate took place last week in Frankfort, where a committee discussed the pros and cons of mandating police body cameras in Kentucky.
Daviess County Sheriff Keith Cain, who testified at the hearing, estimated that body cameras would cost the his office an additional $90,000 a year. The cameras themselves would cost around $50,000 for 30 employees, Cain said, while a $40,000 price tag would make up the “hidden recurring costs” related to storage, maintenance and additional staff to manage the computer systems and data.
While the question of funding has yet to be answered, both Cain and Chief Deputy Sheriff Major Barry Smith said they fully supported utilizing body cameras for their deputies.
“If this is something the General Assembly thinks should happen, and I personally agree that it should, I would hope that this body would start by looking at where that money would come from because most of the communities in Kentucky will not be able to afford them,” Cain said.
While Smith also expressed support toward the use of body cameras, he said DCSO didn’t support a state-mandated law requiring them.
“We just can’t absorb the extra work with our existing personnel,” Smith said. “[The state would be expecting us to] buy them and maintain the storage and fees associated with them. The costs associated with having to hire a full-time person to organize and maintain the files and respond to open records requests would go into the additional $100,000 a year it would cost us.”
Owensboro Police Department, meanwhile, is currently evaluating body cameras for its staff of 110 officers.
OPD Public Information Officer Andrew Boggess expressed concerns surrounding the year-after-year costs of using body cams. In line with what Cain and Smith pointed out, Boggess said the underlying budgetary issues would stem not from the cost of the cameras themselves, but from their upkeep and maintenance.
“Some of the cameras can be several hundred dollars. But the storage for all that video would cost thousands upon thousands,” Boggess said. “Our budgets are finite. We could probably come up with the money to get them, but we’d have to make sacrifices somewhere else.”
While Boggess said OPD very much supported the idea of body cams for its officers, he also said all the equipment varied in price and quality, and that the entire endeavor would cost the department more than most people realized.
Though DCSO hasn’t begun experimenting with body cameras yet, Smith said a former deputy paid for his own and used it while on the job. DCSO provided a server for the downloaded video footage, which gave Smith a glimpse into what could be viewed and observed through a body camera.
“That showed the kind of quality footage they provided,” he said. “The camera [doesn’t show] everything that goes on — you don’t see everything the deputy sees — but they could be very useful to have for any complaints that might come our way, or during a pursuit.”
