70 Tucson police officers to wear cameras

“We’ve been looking at this for well over a year,” said Sgt. Pete Dugan, a police spokesman.

Twenty-six of the cameras, which were made by Scottsdale-based Taser International, will be worn by motor officers, 32 by patrol officers and 12 by officers on bicycles or foot in the downtown unit, he said.

Training for basic operations, a four-hour session put on by Taser, is scheduled for last week of March through first week of April, he said. When the cameras are issued and the officers complete their training to receive a certification, the cameras will be deployed for use in the field.

In September 2014, the city of Tucson approved a resolution to allocate $182,877 from a $385,000 grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Justice to the city and Pima County to Tucson police for the purchase of body-worn cameras, storage and redaction, training and maintenance.

Tucson police purchased an assortment of options available from Taser, including cameras worn on an officer’s chest and a flex type that allows officers to attach the camera to their sunglassses or shoulders. The price of each unit ranges from $399 to $599, depending on options.

The department has been looking at purchasing body cameras for over a year, Dugan said. It went through a trial period with different types, during which Sgt. Joel Mann’s helmet camera recorded footage of the officer shoving a UA student, Christina Gardilcic, to the ground on March 29 when a crowd gathered on University Boulevard after the UA basketball team’s loss to Wisconsin.

“We did (the trial) through NCAA and we found that it was beneficial during that,” Dugan said. The footage served as evidence in an internal investigation and was released to the media.

A 2014 Police Executive Research Forum report, based on survey responses from 254 law enforcement agencies and experience shared by police executives, stated that the perceived benefits of body-worn cameras include reducing citizens’ complaints against police officers, resolving such complaints, identifying and correcting an agency’s internal problems and using recorded data as evidence.

“(It allows for) transparency and accountability for both the agencies and the public,” the Tucson police spokesman said. “There’s obviously a strong push out there from the community.”

The report also quoted Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor saying, “I really believe that body-worn cameras are the wave of the future for most police agencies. This technology is driving the expectations of the public. They see this out there, and they see that other agencies that have it, and their question is ‘Why don’t you have it?’”

In the meantime, state lawmakers are trying to restrict the public’s access to the recorded data from the police body cameras. Senate Bill 1300 would limit officers’ recordings to only when they make contact with the public and restrict the public’s access to the footage.

If passed, the bill would add fuel to the already existing privacy concerns regarding police body cameras.

“Now we (could) have police walking around with body cameras to protect everybody’s rights, yet they’re going to keep the data private,” said Tucson City Councilman Steve Kozachik, who voted against the September 2014 resolution to allocate funding for the purchase of body cameras. “I’m interested in everyone’s rights, not just the police.”

He said that he voted against the resolution not so much because of concerns about the use of the cameras but rather, with the infrastructure and protocols that are required to support their use.

It wouldn’t just be the cost of buying the cameras, said Dugan, the police spokesman. There would be additional costs for maintenance, data storage and increased staffing to respond to public-records requests and redact footage.

“Seventy cameras times however many incidents they are going out to – that’s a lot of footage,” he said.

The body-camera program is in a pilot stage, he said. The department will assess the possibility of increasing its inventory.