Lincoln Police Department now using body cameras.

The Lincoln Police Department unveiled a new piece of gear on Feb. 4 that all of its on- duty officers will be wearing: body cameras. In September 2020, Lincoln City Council approved $61,000 of general funds to go toward purchasing 14 Motorola WatchGuard V300 body cameras as well as the software and storage for five years. Lincoln Public Safety Chief Doug Lee said that both his officers and the public have been looking forward to the body cameras. The use of body cameras has become more common in law enforcement as the video evidence they produce can be crucial to cases of excessive use of force by police officers and determining its factualness. "I think everybody needs them now and it is just a matter of finding the resources and support from City Councils and county board of supervisors to move in that direction," Lee said. "The expectation is that everybody has them because everywhere you go, you are being recorded." In a Facebook post on Feb. 4, the Lincoln Police Department (LPD) outlined when officers will begin recording while on duty. "LPD policy states that officers will activate their cameras during enforcement and investigative contacts, traffic stops, self-initiated activity, and any other contact that becomes adversarial after the initial contact," the Facebook post read. "They may stop recording during very limited, specific situations." The cameras are always on, Lee said. When an officer presses the record button, the camera is able to save up to 30 seconds before the officer begins recording but without audio. What has kept Lincoln from purchasing the body camera system, according to Lee, is not the cost of the cameras but storing the video files. "When body cameras first came out, nobody was doing cloud storage and you had to store them on servers and host them at your police department to store all of the data," Lee said. "So it was extremely cost prohibitive for small departments like ours." Now the officers are able to place the cameras on docking stations that charge the cameras and allow access to the cloud-based system created by Wathguard. Lee said that the Watchguard system also allows the department to quickly redact any information that they are not legally allowed to show to the public, such as a victim's identity, license plate numbers and home addresses. Since Rocklin and Auburn Police departments use body cameras, Roseville Police Department is in the process of getting City Council approval and the Placer County Sheriff's Office uses car cameras and will soon use body cameras, Lee said, it was time to get their own. "A few months before I started here, we did have an officer-involved shooting at the McDonalds," Lee said. "There was some video surveillance from the security at the McDonalds, but it certainly would have been nice to have something from the officer's perspective of someone coming at him with a knife." Each officer on duty will be assigned a camera when they start their shift and log onto their computers.