Strathroy-Caradoc police introducing body cameras

Strathroy-Caradoc Police Service is currently implementing body-worn cameras for its officers.

With the process starting roughly a year ago, some cameras are already on the street while others are being phased in.

“We introduced an interest we had to our services board, and they were really receptive to seeing us introduce obviously new technologies for our members,” says Strathroy-Caradoc Police Chief, Mark Campbell.

Those technologies are not just to record police interactions, but also feeds into how evidence is given to the court.

“The justice system was opening some doors to allow some additional ways to get evidence into court cases as part of the, you know, presenting evidence,” says Campbell

St. Thomas police made the move to body cameras over a year ago and have been very pleased with the results.

“For investigative purposes, we've been solving crimes because the body-worn cameras for efficiency purposes, and also for other complaints,” says Chief, Chris Herridge.

London Police Service (LPS), the largest service in the area, has not started the process of implementing body worn cameras.

No one from LPS was available for an interview with CTV news on Tuesday, but a written response was offered, citing costs of the program for a city the size of London, as well as the privacy implications associated with the recording of people, the storage of video and the vetting of that video for court and other purposes.

“This is an issue that will require considerable care to ensure the introduction of this technology does not inadvertently infringe on the rights of others and it is sustainable from a cost perspective,” read the statement.

In St. Thomas, Herridge says it will cost roughly $100,000 a year to maintain the service, which would balloon for a service the size of London. He adds the benefits he didn’t expect were the ability to use the body cam videos for training purposes.

“We had an officer do a fantastic job recently with de-escalating a situation where a knife was involved, potentially violent situation, because it could be a learning opportunity for some other officers her,” said Herridge.

Campbell says they don’t receive a lot of complaints against officers, but this will help if they ever do arise

“We have very high expectations of our members that they will be professional, they will be compassionate and they will operate with empathy. So the technology hopefully will show more of that,” he says.

Campbell also says some officers have been trained and cameras have been deployed already, but there are more officers to be trained with a full roll out expected by the end of January.