Baltimore City Police Body Camera Program: 4 Years to Full Implementation

Documents released by Baltimore City officials note that the city’s proposed police body camera program will take four years to be fully implemented. As reported in The Baltimore Sun:

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the City Council have repeatedly clashed over the speed with which the city is implementing body cameras. The council passed a bill in 2014 requiring all 2,800 police officers to be equipped with the cameras within a year — but Rawlings-Blake vetoed the legislation, criticizing the bill as rushed and wasteful.

Rawlings-Blake, who says she supports the cameras, appointed a task force to study the issue, and pledged to move forward with a pilot program by the end of 2015.

“I would rather be thoughtful and right than fast and wrong,” Rawlings-Blake said last year. “The worst thing we can do … is to roll out a program that hasn’t been thought through.”

In a request for bids on the work, city officials wrote this month that the pilot program will last at least 60 days and include 155 officers, including 15 from the special enforcement section, and 140 from the Eastern, Western and Central police districts.

City officials wrote that each shift would equip 11 or 12 officers with body cameras during the pilot program.

After the cameras are tested, city officials would then begin to fully implement the program, equipping 500 officers were per with the cameras over the next three years, and 1,000 in the fourth year for a total of 2,500 cameras.

For more information read the full article in The Baltimore Sun. and previous coverage on Conduit Street.

Police body camera programs will be discussed at the MACo Summer Conference on a panel entitled “Body Cameras: Justice Through the Lens”. The MACo Summer Conference will be held August 12-15 at the Roland Powell Convention Center in Ocean City, Maryland. This year’s conference theme is “Energize. Mobilize. Capitalize.”

Learn more about MACo’s Summer Conference:

For a schedule of educational sessions at MACo’s Summer Conference, please view the Registration Brochure.

Questions? Contact Meetings & Events Director Virginia White.