A federal grant for $430,000 will help the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office become the latest law enforcement agency to outfit its deputies with body-worn video cameras to record interactions with the public.
The Fresno County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted this week to authorize Sheriff John Zanoni to accept the grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. The grant will go toward the purchase of 215 cameras for deputies and about 20 correctional officers in the Fresno County Jail.
It was Zanoni’s second attempt at persuading the county supervisors to accept the grant. At the board’s April 11 meeting, supervisors expressed concern about the Sheriff’s Office being about $2 million over its 2022-23 budget and voiced hesitation over the ongoing costs of maintaining a camera program. The board asked that the cost figures for the camera program be fine-tuned before returning to the board.
On Tuesday, Zanoni estimated that the program cost for the cameras — for managing recorded video, service and maintenance, technology support and more — would be about $3.2 million over five years. The county already has some of that money in the form of “innovation funds” for law enforcement, as well as funds set aside for the welfare of jail inmates that would be used for cameras deployed in the jail.
Zanoni said he believed the upside of the cameras include potential reduction in legal costs associated with lawsuits against the county over such incidents as officer-involved shootings and other dealings with the public.
Within the central San Joaquin Valley, only Fresno and Kings counties don’t have body-worn cameras for their sheriff’s deputies. Sheriff’s departments in Madera, Mariposa, Tulare and Kern counties all have camera programs, as do the nearby cities of Fresno, Clovis, Madera, Visalia and Porterville.
Among California’s most populous counties, Fresno is the last one to move toward getting body cameras for its deputies, Zanoni said.
“Video is truth,” he added, “and it is time that we kind of catch up with the times.”
Some civil rights advocates last month expressed some misgivings about law enforcement officers using body-worn cameras, including the potential for their misuse. But Zanoni characterized the cameras as a means of building transparency, accountability and trust for deputies.
As part of Zanoni’s request, supervisors also approved the addition of an IT analyst for the sheriff’s office to oversee management of the cameras.
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