GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — As body camera video is becoming more crucial evidence these days, Green Bay Police say they’re getting ready to roll them out soon.
“The events of the last several years really got us focused again looking at the body camera systems. Came up with Axon as the best of the best for us and for our needs,” said Green Bay Police Captain Ben Allen.
After finalizing a contract late last year with a company named Axon to provide the cameras, police say they finally have all the equipment; all the pieces are part of that new system in-house.
“Which includes the taser, body camera, and squad cameras,” Allen said.
He said the department’s initial hope was to have all officers fully trained with body cameras by June. However, they’re making it a push to get that done sooner.
“The events of the last couple of days have really changed things. The incident out in Minnesota and along with some of the riots and things that were as a result of that ” Allen said.
He said their police sergeants were trained last week with the body camera systems and are actually on the field already using them.
“Next is our patrol officers and we’re working with them starting this week to really kinda get that ramped up and get them out there as soon as possible,” Allen said. “Our initial hope was to have that done by June and we pushed that up a little bit and we’re hoping to have it done by April or May.”
He said their officers are anxious to get them after going through the initial training with the Axon body cameras, he says it was pretty user-friendly.
He shares how they have a young team of patrol officers who are tech-savvy and who will hopefully have no problem picking it up quickly.
Allen says having body cameras helps them paint a better picture when it comes to investigations as it’s a big help with documentation.
He says since starting the process of obtaining body cameras they’ve partnered up with Appleton Police who have the same body camera system.
“A lot of it was developing policy. They’ve learned a lot over their ten years with what worked well and what didn’t work well,” Allen said. “So we’re able to really dive deep into policy with them and basically utilize a lot of what they’ve learned to our policy.”
Appleton Police Department says the body cameras have become essential in their every day work and investigations.
"The ability for our officers to have them. They really like them. They like the ability of having the footage of what they are doing. So that there is also the ability to look back at the lessons learned sometimes," said Meghan Cash, Appleton Police Department.
