By Pepper Fisher

PORT ANGELES – The Port Angeles Police Department was just awarded a grant of $13,720 from the Dept. of Justice which they’ll use to get their body-worn camera program going.

The City is going to share the costs and operations of the program with the Clallam County Sheriff’s Office. And, while this grant doesn’t cover the entire cost, when added to what has already been allocated in the city budget, Police Chief Brian Smith says it should be enough to get his officer body cam program up and running sometime this winter.

That said, there’s still a lot of work to do before that happens. Chief Smith says they have to settle on vendors for the equipment, software, cloud storage, and other aspects of a modern system. At a quarter million dollar price tag to fund the program over 5 years, they have to get it right.

“The other part of it is, this stuff’s expensive. The cost of this stuff has come down, but it’s still very expensive. So, we have to do our due diligence and make sure we have a product that’s going to be very usable for the officers, for our records staff, is going to meet all the requirements of public records. And you remember, we’ve talked about this before. The biggest impediment in Washington to going live with body-worn camera programs is that the requirements of the Public Records Act are substantial. They require you to review stuff, and redact things, and it can be very time consumptive on records requests. You have to get all that stuff sorted out before you go live.”

The extra work involved for officers and staff in adopting a body cam program is something the public may not be aware of. Smith says every minute of body cam recordings are subject to public records requests and have to be edited and reviewed before they can go out.

“You have to remember that, say we record like 15 minutes of video. We have to review all that video and apply all the redaction exemptions, like blur out faces, you know, we’re inside a house, we can’t show anything. There’s all these things we have to do when we process that stuff before we can release it. So, the software that’s in there has to be designed for storage and for redaction in a way that doesn’t create a ton of extra work for our staff. So, you have to be really careful on which product you pick.”

In Sequim, Chief Sheri Crane told us her officers just went live with their body cams this fall. She says her office also received a Department of Justice grant specific to small, rural agencies, to offset their initial costs.

As for the County Sheriff’s Office, Chief Criminal Deputy Amy Bundy said getting their program going has a number of challenges because of the size of their jurisdiction, the multiple detachments between Jamestown and Forks, west side connectivity issues, and more. She said it was too early to give an estimate of when the Sheriff’s body cam program will go live.