Highway Patrol officers to wear body cameras
With a new look and new roles comes new equipment.
The Saskatchewan Highway Patrol, being formed out of the existing Commercial Vehicle Enforcement team, will be equipped with body cameras.
The name and role change is set for July 1.
At the unveiling of the new vehicle design on Wednesday morning, David Marit, provincial minister of highways and infrastructure, said cameras are not a new idea in the enforcement industry and that the majority of RCMP already have vehicle cameras.
The existing Commercial Vehicle Enforcement team has had vehicle cameras for years, said Brendan Tuchscherer, assistant director of the Saskatchewan Highway Patrol.
“This is just basically making the video we had before more mobile, so if we are away from our vehicles we’re just capturing the same images, just they’re going to be right on our bodies,” Tuchscherer said. “Not a huge change for us.”
Robin Litzenberger is the current director of Commercial Vehicle Enforcement and will switch over to chief of Saskatchewan Highway Patrol.
“We thought since we’re changing and broadening our duties ... this was sort of the next evolution, so for our own use and purposes, it was a decision we thought was appropriate,” Litzenberger said.
Officers didn’t have any concerns about the body cameras because they have become comfortable with audio and video recording through the vehicle cameras, he said.
The cameras won’t be running all the time.
“We’ll have them activated when we’re involved in, say, a traffic stop or responding to a call,” said Litzenberger.
“We’ll turn them on, capture that event, and then turn them off. That way you’re not continuously capturing images for no good reason.”
When officers return to their detachment, they will put the cameras in a docking station. The videos will be downloaded and then “stored centrally in a cloud-based databank,” Litzenberger said.
There is no set cost for the body cameras yet, as Marit said the province is still waiting for the tenders to come back.
Marit is excited to see the Commercial Vehicle Enforcement’s duties expand to better support the RCMP and municipal police.
The officers’ new duties will include responding to 911 calls and vehicle accidents, giving out speeding tickets and reacting to stolen vehicles, on top of their existing duties of commercial vehicle enforcement.
Tuchscherer is confident this change of duties and increased law enforcement presence will help lower rural crime rates.
“With all of our training and stuff we’ve been doing the last several months, I think we’re well-prepared for any situation we may get ourselves into,” he said.
“We’ve been ever evolving, so this just seems like the logical next step.”