Sedona Police Department will be outfitting all officers with body cameras by Fiscal Year 2023-24.
The department’s first body cameras were introduced in April 2021 as a limited deployment pilot. For the past eight months, the pilot program gave two body cameras for patrol, one for investigations and one for the school resource officer, a position that has been empty since August.
“We are in a planned phase to implement full implementation of body cameras for all of our officers,” City Manager Karen Osburn said. “This will be expanded in Fiscal Year ’23 and by Fiscal Year ’24, we will have full deployment.”
For this upcoming year, the city intends to fund more cameras into the phased program. This will provide SPD the time and information data to hire more redaction staff within the next few years.
“The reason we did not go full deployment was to assess our capacity to run a full complement of body cameras,” SPD Chief Charles Husted said. “What a lot of people do not realize is that it’s not just about having the body cameras out in the field, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work.”
For the department to transition into a full deployment of body cameras, SPD had to think about maintaining and processing the data, as well as the long redaction process that happens afterward to receive the information requested.
Currently, one SPD staff member has been running the video request process. According to city reports, on average, one hour of body camera footage takes around 80 minutes of work. This current staff member also is responsible for the in-car cameras that were updated last year.
“My plan is to add two additional body cameras in this coming year so that we have a full patrol squad,” Husted said. “That will give us a much better idea of what we would need to do as far as bringing in additional personnel, civilian personnel, to manage the program.”
For the full deployment of body cameras, city staff said they believe there will be two additional officers to add to the program in 2024.
Although these positions are not sworn positions, the body camera civilians will go through a higher level of background and vetting stages than other civilian positions in the department before being brought onto the team.
The current software is not capable of redacting the videos on its own, according to City Attorney Kurt Christianson. So, for now, police departments must rely on human workers to complete going through the videos collected.
The City Council was updated at the council retreat on the progress of the body camera deployment. Council members agreed that the budgeting for the cameras is necessary and a priority for the community’s safety.
Police departments all across the country have been implementing body cameras for years. Husted came from the Sacramento Police Department in 2019 where cameras had been in the field for years.
“I’m very familiar with the benefits of having body camera implementation in law enforcement,”
Husted said. “Body cameras have more or less created an element of greater trust between the community and the police officer.”
