San Bernardino County has become the most recent Southern California sheriff’s department to begin using body cameras when it issued the devices to its patrol deputies in San Bernardino and Hesperia this month.
“Body-worn cameras are an additional tool our deputies will be able to use to maintain high standards of policing, accountability, and transparency within the communities we serve,” the department said in a statement.
In February, the Board of Supervisors approved a five-year, $6.5 million contract with Axon Enterprises to provide 965 cameras as well as other equipment and technical support. Other stations will receive the cameras as the equipment becomes available.
The rollout was delayed, Sheriff Shannon Dicus has said, because of a lack of server storage and the fact that some deputies during a pilot program had difficulty transmitting the video from their High Desert station to the department’s servers in the nation’s largest county by size. Videos will now be uploaded to the cloud, which is expected to eliminate the technical troubles.
The cameras have limitations: They can break or malfunction, they don’t always see what the officer sees, and they won’t record if officers don’t activate them. But officers have praised the cameras for providing evidence that supports their version of events and sometimes prompts citizens to drop what officers say are unfounded complaints.
San Diego County adopted the cameras in 2017, Riverside County in 2018 and Orange and Los Angeles counties in 2021. The cities of Corona, Chino, Indio, Palm Springs, Rialto, San Bernardino and Fontana began using them in 2016, followed by Riverside in 2017.
Lolita Harper, the executive director of the Sheriff’s Employees’ Benefit Association, the union that represents deputies, praised the department’s negotiations on the camera policy.
“What exists now is a policy that truly encapsulates the best practices utilizing this technology in the profession of law enforcement,” Harper said in a video statement to SEBA’s membership.
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