Ferguson Police Wear Cameras

Police officers here began wearing body cameras over the weekend as marchers took to the streets in the most recent protest of a shooting three weeks earlier by a city officer that left an unarmed teenager dead.

Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said his department was given about 50 body cameras by two companies, Safety Visions and Digital Ally, about a week earlier. The companies donated the body cameras after the fatal shooting on Aug. 9 of Michael Brown Jr. by Ferguson officer Darren Wilson.

Company representatives were at the police department on Saturday training officers to use the devices, which attach to uniforms and record video and audio. Some members of the police department have been specially trained on the devices’ use.

“We are still playing with them,” Jackson said.

The cameras are being assigned to squads, and each officer will get one to use, he said.

Jackson said the officers had the devices on during the protest march on Saturday and were able to capture video images of crowd members taunting officers.

“The quality is good,” he said.

Video recordings are seen as a way to allow judges and juries to follow police-involved events as they unfold, helping to shed light through the often-conflicting or hazy recollections of witnesses.

After Brown’s shooting, other police departments in the St. Louis area are also moving toward the use of wearable cameras. Ellisville approved a $7,500 expenditure shortly after the shooting to buy cameras for its officers.

They are also catching on elsewhere. Last month, a New York City official championed a $5 million pilot program to outfit 15 percent of the city’s police officers with wearable cameras.

This article appeared in print on page 3 of the September 2nd, 2014 edition of Hamodia.