The Catoosa County Sheriff’s Office is getting its first body-worn cameras, a purchase approved by the county’s Board of Commissioners at their Feb. 2 meeting.
“I have been in this business going on 32 years. Thought it would never come to where we would have to record everything that we did, but unfortunately it’s come to a time that we need to protect ourselves from false claims, and also watch our officers and make sure they’re doing what they need to do,” Sheriff Gary R. Sisk said during the meeting.
No recent claims have been made against Catoosa County Sheriff’s Office employees, he told the Times Free Press in a follow-up interview.
“It could protect all of us, in that hopefully there should be video of an incident of any encounter with civilians, whether it protects the officer or the civilian or the county as a whole,” he said.
The county plans to purchase 33 body cameras and 36 bundled body and car camera systems from WatchGuard, which Sisk said is a Motorola subsidiary.
“This would put cameras on every one of our frontline officers, to include some in the jail and even my narcotics investigators that are going out,” Sisk told the commissioners before they voted to approve the purchase. “These are a lot of some of your high-risk-type areas and it’ll be good that they’ll have those as well.”
Around 15 officers, or about half of the department’s frontline officers, previously had car cameras, Sisk told the Times Free Press. The new bundled body and car camera systems are paired to enable the body and car camera footage to be uploaded onto video together, he said.
“If an altercation were to occur then of course as many views as you can get of it of different angles, then the better off we’re going to be,” said Sisk.
He said during the meeting that even though there are more than 70 cameras in the county jail, some areas do not have cameras and video of some areas does not include sound.
All floor officers dealing directly with inmates now will have body-worn cameras, Sisk said.
The total, one-time cost of the 33 V300 body-worn cameras and the 36 V300 body-worn cameras and 4RE car camera system bundles is $300,000. The installation of the car cameras costs an additional $10,080.
That total cost also covers cloud storage and a three-year extended warranty, Sisk told commissioners, adding he expects the cameras to last about five years.
He said money was allocated from the county’s capital projects fund for the purchase during the budgeting process.
“I think this is something that’s been a long time coming, and I think to protect our officers and also our citizens is extremely important and have everything recorded,” said Commissioner Vanita Hullander.
Sisk responded that he agrees with Hullander.
“I think it just took a while for the technology to kind of get to where more than one company was really putting things out there so you didn’t just have to go with one company,” he said.
The purchase would put the county in compliance with the Police Accountability Act, Georgia House Bill 18, which was in second reading before the state Legislature Feb. 4. If passed, the law would require all law enforcement agencies to provide a body-worn camera to each of the agency’s peace officers.
Peace officers include any person with the authority to enforce criminal or traffic laws through powers of arrest, and whose duties include the preservation of public order, the protection of life and property, and the prevention, detection or investigation of crimes, according to the state Peace Officer Standards and Training Council’s website.
Contact Emily Crisman at 423-757-6508 or ecrisman@timesfreepress.com.