EASTHAMPTON — The city’s police department is one step closer to equipping all of its officers with body-worn cameras after securing a $40,000 state grant.
Easthampton Police is one of 64 departments across Massachusetts that was awarded state funding to establish or expand body-worn cameras programs in their departments. The other Hampshire County grant recipient was the Hatfield Police Department, which was awarded $5,638.
In Franklin County, the Greenfield Police Department was awarded a $66,000 state grant. Officers in Whately and Warwick are already equipped with body cameras.
Currently, there is no existing program at the Easthampton Police Department, which has 30 full-time police officers and approximately 10 part-time police officers, said Detective and K-9 Handler Andrew Beaulieu.
“We’re very thankful for the money we’ve received. It will certainly help get our body-worn camera program off the ground and supplement the full cost of the program,” Beaulieu said.
The grants are the first in a five-year, $20 million capital grant program administered by the office of grants and research within the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. The program is expected to deploy approximately 9,000 body-worn cameras to law enforcement agencies across Massachusetts.
As part of the grant application process, each municipal police department is required to submit a deployment plan that details a deliberate and phased approach to implement the technology as well as specific ways the proposed program will enhance the agency’s mission.
Beaulieu said a policy will need to be developed that’s agreeable to both the police union and the city. The Executive Office of Public Safety and Security has developed a body camera task force, which the department will be looking to for some guidance, he added.
Outside of the purchase of the cameras and developing a policy, departments like Easthampton are concerned with the cost of funding and managing on-premises servers for secure video storage, said Mark Leahy, the executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association and a retired Northborough police chief.
“This is a great start, but there are still concerns about what the true cost will be in storing the digital information,” he said.
At this point, the infrastructure, policies and protocols for a body camera program don’t exist in most departments. For smaller departments that do not have the manpower, keeping up with uploading footage after each shift, Freedom of Information Act requests and discovery requests from the court is a challenge, Leahy said.
A poll conducted by the Massachusetts Chief of Police Association indicated that while only 10% of Massachusetts municipal departments operate a body-worn camera program, 75% of departments in both major cities and smaller communities are interested in starting a program. Leahy also noted that numbers obtained from the survey are likely higher because like many polls, the association was not able to get a 100% response rate.
Hampshire County police departments have stated in the past that body-worn cameras have been on their radars, but financially the expense was a lot to consider. The cost of outfitting 50 police officers and sergeants with body cameras in the Northampton Police Department in 2014 was about $90,000 for the equipment and data storage over five years, according to an earlier Gazette report citing Northampton Police Chief Jody Kasper.
Emily Thurlow can be reached at ethurlow@gazettenet.com
