Such an acquisition would give TPD a total of 574 cameras, which would allow every officer who interacts with the public to be outfitted with a camera, Lt. James Brown told Toledo City Council last week.
A proposal to require all TPD officers be outfitted with body cameras was introduced to council in June, and along with several other items related to police reform, that piece of legislation was sent to committee.
The intention is for the Community-Police Relations and Reform Committee, formed in response to calls for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, to take the proposals into consideration and determine the best way to implement changes to policing in Toledo.
Independent of the proposed legislation, Toledo police Chief George Kral has said it is his goal to get every officer who’s out on the street outfitted with a body camera.
All field officers received Getac body cameras in 2018, but currently neither Special Weapons and Tactics officers nor members of the gang task force have them.
TPD is also in the process of transferring the storage of body camera footage to Getac’s cloud service instead of its own servers. The cost of using the cloud service is about $280,000 annually.
The reason for switching to the cloud service is simply because the police department is running out of electronic storage, Lieutenant Brown told council.
“We were doing this on our own servers, and especially with the addition of the purchase of new cameras, there’s not enough space to manage our server any longer,” Lieutenant Brown said.
Lt. Kellie Lenhardt, the police department’s spokesman, said hundreds of cameras are running consistently and the department has to keep the footage in accordance with public-records laws. Over time, it adds up to a lot of footage.
From November through last month, TPD used 96 terabytes of storage, Lt. Lenhardt said.
Moving storage off-premises also would protect the department against server crashes that could cause problems for camera footage, the spokesman said.
Council is scheduled to vote on authorizing the funds for the transfer during its meeting Tuesday.
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