Here’s why one Pierce County police department had to replace body camera equipment
More than a year after it was announced, Gig Harbor’s body camera program for its police officers is still not yet fully operational. Officers are still facing incidents of footage being lost and equipment setbacks.
According to police chief Kelly Busey, the department has decided to replace all of its digital video recorders (DVRs), which he says are the primary point of failure.
“It’s really just more of the same lingering issues — mainly getting video from the body camera to the DVR (and thus, uploaded to the cloud storage),” Busy said in an email. “The vendor is sending us all new, next-gen DVRs (at no cost) and we hope this will remedy the situation.”
The DVRs, which are installed in the patrol car’s dash, store the body-camera video until it can be uploaded to cloud storage at the station. They have been troublesome, Busey said.
Busy said the replacement DVRs arrived last Wednesday afternoon and will begin to be put in place immediately. Busy also said the vendor will be sending USB cable extensions that had previously been undersized for the department’s systems.
“We will be working with our upfitter to install the replacements in the next several weeks by cycling one or two cars through at a time,” Busy said.
The vendor the department is using is called Getac. It is known primarily as a maker of field-hardened laptops for police and military use that has grown into the body camera business.
Lucas Fritz, manager of marketing and sales operations for Getac, told The Gateway in a phone interview that the lengthy delays in Gig Harbor, which has a department of 20 officers, was not typical.
“This is quite abnormal. Normally, for us, a full-scale deployment can take in the ballpark of one week to we’ll say three for us to fully deploy and get a department 100 percent operational,” Fritz said. “It depends on the agency, obviously, and their functions, right? We can only work sometimes at the speed of the agency when it comes to in-car installations for the in-car video and then training as well.”
Glitches and problems in use aren’t uncommon with body camera programs.
According to the publication Fast Company, footage can easily be lost, either by accident or when officers forget to turn their cameras on. There can be problems with software, such as a case when an Oakland department lost a quarter of all video clips after an upgrade was installed. Closer to home in Seattle, “in-car dashboard camera videos have frequently dropped frames, at times leaving gaps of more than an hour in video records.” According to reporting by Crosscut’s David Kroman, the Seattle department also lost over 2,000 in-car video recordings from July 13 and 14 of 2016.
Gig Harbor’s program has experienced such problems over the past year.
In April, body camera footage of a confrontation between restaurant staff and an armed, unmasked customer was lost. Busey then provided an in-person demonstration of how it was supposed to work.
In June, another officer attempted to record an interaction when out on patrol. He later discovered it had just captured the end of the encounter.
In response to questions about the issue of lost footage, an emailed statement from Fritz on behalf of Getac said “please refer any questions regarding unsaved data to the Police Department.”
Asked about the newest loss of footage, Busey said he hadn’t “yet spoken directly to the officer, so I don’t know that exact problem.”
“Most of the cameras are still working as designed; we are just seeing random uploading issues,” Busy said. “Until we get the upgraded DVRs in place, there is not much point in chasing these occasional problems.”
Busey said Getac was chosen as the vendor because the department already had the company’s “laptops and tablets in use, so we wanted to stay with a system that would integrate with that infrastructure.”
The department’s optimistic estimates have had to be revised several times.
Last June, Busey said that his department would be the third in the state to have their program up and running, pledging it would be done within the next “30 to 45 days.”
“We are well on track to get it up and running,” Busy said at the time.
In early March, Busey acknowledged that they had fallen behind schedule, due to unforeseen technical hurdles. Later that month, more problems arose when a glitch caused the DVRs to drain police vehicle batteries.
As for when the program will be fully operational, Busy said last week that all issues will be resolved “soon.”
“We are a small department that has been doing the best with our available resources to roll out this new program during a pandemic event,” Busey said. “The Gig Harbor Police Department is committed to perfecting our body camera system as part of our commitment to being progressive and transparent in the fulfillment of our mission to provide the best possible public safety and service to our community.”
This story was originally published July 8, 2021 at 5:30 AM.
