Nashville is testing body cameras, marking its third round of field trials in as many years.
Mayor John Cooper announced Tuesday morning that the police department will begin a slow rollout in March, starting with two dozen officers in traffic-related units, and then dole out 20 more cameras in May, for a three-month beta testing period.
The mayor’s office says it will then study the technology’s impact to assess funding and policy needs moving forward. But it could be about a year — or longer — before all Metro Police officers are wearing them.
“It’s important that we get this done, and it’s important that we get it right,” Cooper said in a statement. “This plan puts cameras in the field as soon as the infrastructure is there to support them and allows us to learn what works in the process.”
The announcement comes after a series of broken promises and missed deadlines in the city’s body camera program, as reported last month by WPLN. Just weeks before Cooper took office, then-Mayor David Briley signed a contract with a camera vendor and said deployment could begin as early as September of this year.
But Cooper has taken a slower approach. In his statement, the mayor said several issues needed to be addressed first in order “to move forward with body-worn cameras as quickly and responsibly as possible.”
One major concern has been funding. Beyond the millions of dollars it will cost the police department to purchase cameras for its approximately 1,400 officers, there are future costs, like data storage for the countless hours of footage the cameras will capture each day.
Both the police department and other agencies, such as the district attorney’s office and public defender’s office, will also need to hire additional staff to view and redact videos before they’re released to the public or used at trial. Last week, DA Glenn Funk released a report his office commissioned to study the potential financial impact of body cameras on the city’s criminal justice system. It estimated annual costs of up to $30 million for his office, nearly $4 million for the public defender and $2.3 million for the criminal court clerk.
Mayor Cooper said his office also plans to help the city’s criminal justice agencies finalize a set of policies before rolling out body cameras to all police officers. Rules and protocols, including when officers should record, how long footage should be stored and when video can be released to the public, will all play a role in how much the program will cost the city. They’ll also determine how the footage should be used if an arrest is made or a case goes to trial.
“As body cameras are deployed by the police department, then we need to make sure that the lawyers in the criminal justice system have the ability to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities,” Funk said in an interview with WPLN last week. “Mayor Cooper’s office has been working really hard with all of the stakeholders to make sure that we can protect the constitutional rights of victims, of witnesses, and of those individuals who are charged with crimes.”
The mayor’s office says it will meet later this week with the Criminal Justice Advisory Board, a working group that coordinates policies of the courts and law enforcement agencies, to start resolving any outstanding issues. In the meantime, the police department is working with the city’s technology department to prepare all eight precincts for rollout.
“Nashville’s residents and police officers have been anxiously waiting for body-worn cameras since the initial announcement three years ago,” Cooper said. “I’m excited that we can now move from talking about cameras to deploying them.”
Samantha Max is a Report for America corps member.
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