Four city police cruisers will soon have dashboard cameras

Greater Sudbury Police will soon be rolling out dashboard cameras on four cruisers, as the force moves ahead with efforts to increase transparency when officers engage with the public.

Meeting April 9, Chief Paul Pedersen said current plans are to install the cameras and to do an assessment after a year, with an eye on expanding them to more cruisers.

“Where do we see this going?” Pedersen said. “It's all about (increasing) transparency to the public we serve.”

While the technology is relatively cheap, Pedersen the bigger issues are privacy concerns and storing all the data collected safely.

Dashboard cameras capture suspects and bystanders alike, and those videos have to be securely stored because it would be a serious privacy breach if they were somehow compromised. The same holds true for body cameras, which would record all incidents away from the cruisers.

“If you can imagine a camera on a police officer capturing people undressed, young kids,” he said. “That all gets captured, then we need staff to pixelate that out.

“So it's not something that can't be done, but it's something that needs to be planned for.”

Police CAO Sharon Baiden said the force needs to review and analyze procedures and protocols for before they go forward.

“It's still a very, very new area for policing,” Baiden said. “It's the backbone of systems and staffing that we need to have in place.”

Training is almost complete in another new area for police: Tasers. Pedersen said officers will complete their training this month, and the entire force will carry them.

The additional training focused on “de-escalation” techniques, to give officers ways to cool down situations, so the Tasers would only be used as a last resort.