Police in various Nassau County communities will soon be wearing body cameras to track officer interactions with the public to determine whether to implement a department-wide system, officials said Monday.
During the year-long pilot, 62 cameras from three vendors will be used by 31 officers from the First, Third and Fifth precincts, tracking activity beginning August 1 in Baldwin, Elmont, Great Neck, New Cassel, Roosevelt, Uniondale and Westbury, officials said.
The pilot would cost $150,000 taken from the county’s operational fund, with a full-time program costing upwards of $9 million, officials said.
“This is technology that is germane to the functions of a police officer,” Acting Nassau County Police Commissioner Thomas Krumpter said during a news conference unveiling the pilot program. “The job of a police officer is to gather evidence and this is what we’re doing with this pilot program, we’re gathering evidence.”
Krumpter said the body camera program did not result from the events in Ferguson, Mo., Staten Island or Baltimore, Md., in which protests and rioting took place following the deaths of unarmed black men during police interactions, some recorded by witnesses using cell phone cameras.
He said the county announced its intentions to implement a body camera program last year along with a similar program with police in the Village of Freeport, which experimented with a program last summer and will now require officers to wear them.
“There were a lot of legal questions that had to be answered, and we aren’t going to rush into a pilot until we were ready and had all those questions answered,” he said.
Krumpter would not disclose the policies and procedures under which police would be required to abide to use the cameras, saying they would be “fine-tuned” prior to the start of the pilot.
He said officers would use discretion in documenting interactions with the public, adding special victims cases or those involving alleged child abuse would likely not be appropriate to respect the privacy of victims.
“You can’t establish any policy that would answer every single question that an officer will face,” Krumpter said.
Two of the three vendors have been selected for use in the pilot program, Taser International and Panasonic.
Video taken from the body cameras would be uploaded to a cloud-based system and accessed with Freedom of Information Law requests and under subpoena, officials said.
Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano said the pilot program would provide increased transparency between the county and public and cited a 25 percent drop in crime since he took office in 2010.
Additionally, Democratic county legislators Kevan Abrahams (Freeport), Carrie Solages (Elmont) and Siela Bynoe (Westbury) said their constituents had a favorable view of the police department but supported the camera program as a means of increasing public trust.
“We must always remember that transparency is the cornerstone to building public trust,” said Abrahams, the legislature’s minority leader. “Bringing body camera technology to Nassau is about protecting the police officers that risk their lives to protect us while fostering confidence in all our relations with each and every community.”
