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The Peterborough Police Service will be introducing a six-month pilot program of body-worn cameras possibly beginning as soon as Oct. 1, Chief Stu Betts told the police service board Tuesday afternoon.
Betts says the service will obtain eight body-worn cameras to be deployed as early as next month, but says full implementation will have to wait until a sense of costs and labour can be brought back to the board.
“I am not prepared to commit the organization to a course of action until you have wholesome insight and at least something we will have a budget for,” Betts said, pointing to a report that notes costs and workload will be monitored to inform a final position.
Betts did not publicly disclose the cost of the cameras Tuesday, saying only he would try to “get the best possible price” by bundling the equipment with other software provided by Arizona-based vendor Axon (formerly Taser), which currently provides the service’s in-car camera system.
The pilot program comes in the wake of a 2022 survey of the Peterborough community and internal members of the police service in partnership with Trent University.
“The overwhelming majority of people indicated that they do want the police to have body-borne cameras for a variety of reasons — transparency, accountability — and that is the prevailing (trend) about the police wearing body cams,” Betts said of the findings that garnered 1,282 responses.
A report included in the police service board meeting package shows 89 per cent of community members polled said they supported police wearing body-worn cameras. Seventy-five per cent of internal police members polled supported wearing cameras while 12.5 per cent said they weren’t needed but would be beneficial.
Betts warned there is a significant cost associated with the full implementation, specifically with the redaction of videos for court and freedom of information requests.
“The hardware is probably the least costly aspect of this particular initiative,” Betts said.
“Despite the fact that there are tools that will help us accelerate that, we still have to make sure that those tools are actually accurate in what they’re doing and more so during the pilot program to satisfy ourselves that if we’re going to seek to move to this as a full-time program.”
The service anticipates each request for video will cost approximately $75 per incident per camera based on an hour of salary for the individual doing the work. Betts noted “it is possible that that amount may change once the true impact on labour and staffing is realized.”
“There is a workload impact and there will be a subsequent downstream workload impact on the courts for body-worn cameras. Just as there is for everything that we’re involved with that has media; the courts will need to have that so that they can disclose it for defence counsel. There are costs all the way down,” Betts added.
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