TUMWATER, Wash. — The Tumwater Police Department says it plans to equip its officers will body-worn cameras, but it won’t be for a few more years.
The department’s interim Police Chief Jay Mason said it probably won’t become a reality until 2027.
During a recent Tumwater Public Health & Safety Committee meeting, Mason spoke about what the process would look like going forward.
“We are excited to get this program up and running as quickly as we can, but we want to make sure we do it the right way,” he said. “We want to make sure we identify and procure the right equipment for our officers and for our community and make sure that we have a proper process to launch.”
The budget for the $1.1 million project was approved in December.
Mason said the department’s next step is to look at staffing.
“In the past, one of the mistakes we’ve made as an organization is, we did a really good job staffing at the technical level, but we didn’t always staff at the leadership or supervision level and that has come back to cause some problems for us,” Mason told the committee.
Mason said there’s also a community engagement and council engagement component for expectations for a program like this.
“Even when a program like this is up and running in other communities, surrounding communities, we want to make sure we understand some of the concerns,” he told the committee.
He said he also wants to better understand the components that people are excited about and bring those to life.
Next would be the equipment identification and procurement process, then training, and then launching the program.
Mason said department staff have reached out to other neighboring agencies to see how long it took them to deploy similar programs. Lacey and Yelm said it took their departments a year to implement their programs, while Olympia police and the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office said it took them each 18 months.
Mason said Thurston County is in the process of transitioning to a different camera vendor, and that alone will take at least a year to complete.
According to Mason, Tumwater police have 21 separate tasks they need to complete to successfully implement this program.
“There are a lot of moving parts to this, and we want to make sure we do this right,” he said.
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