Police officers serving the Village of Franklin Park will be equipped with new body cameras as well as replacement in-car video systems in a few months.
The Village Board last week unanimously approved a $203,952.60 purchase of 50 Model V300 body cams and 14 Model M500 in-car video cameras from Motorola Solutions, Inc.
“This updates the dashcams we’ve had in our squad cars since 2009,” Franklin Park Police Chief Michael Witz said. “These new ones are updated technology and have a camera that points out the front window and another pointed at the back seat. For anyone who’s transported, be it a citizen or someone who’s in custody, the camera is on.”
Witz said body cams are still a relatively new concept to law enforcement, but he expects his 48 sworn officers will be trained on the equipment and using it by July 1.
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The acquisition and deployment of body cams by police throughout Illinois should accelerate in the coming months and years following Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signing of a massive Criminal Justice Reform bill, H.B. 3653.
Among other mandates, police departments in municipalities and counties with populations of 500,000 or more must already have implemented body cameras as of Jan. 1. Police serving populations of 100,000 to 500,000 must have body cams by Jan. 1, 2023, and those serving 50,000 to 100,000 citizens by 2024.
With its population of about 18,000, Franklin Park falls under municipalities and counties with less than 50,000, which must deploy body cameras by 2025. The Illinois State Police also is subject to the same deadline.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Illinois is one of seven U.S. states with police body cam mandates. The others include Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Carolina.
“It’s an unfunded mandate, by the way,” Witz said. “So I thought our department should try to get ahead of the curve, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Witz said police body cams are the right thing to do because they protect the civil rights of citizens as well as those of officers.
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“At first, people were a little resistant about body cams,” he said. “But what sold me on it was seeing selectively edited video of an incident that someone posted online. This now allows everyone to see the true and accurate video of what happened, and usually from multiple angles because of more than one officer on the scene.”
The body cams will be issued as personal equipment to each officer. After returning to the police station, video and audio from the camera automatically uploads to a private in-house server when the body cam is placed in its docking station.
The video and audio content of the in-car systems automatically uploads via a wi-fi hotspot as soon as a squad car arrives back at the station. Both the dashcam and body cam systems have internal backup SD memory cards.
“Not only do we use body cams and dash cams, but we’ll also knock on doors if a resident has a camera on the front door or porch that might assist us in an investigation,” Witz said. “It’s not just law enforcement cameras, it’s an overall effort to find all the video possible to provide an honest statement of what happened. We’re doing our very best to give the community the best service we can and to be as truthful and transparent as we can.”