Delaware County sheriff embraces body cameras
DELAWARE — Holding a knife to his throat, the man kneels in the grass when Delaware County deputy sheriffs surround him.
Calmly, one of the officers repeats, “Steven, please put the knife down. We’re just here to talk.”
The deputy, wearing a body camera, records the man’s every move. Eventually, hte tosses down the knife. He is handcuffed and taken away for a mental health evaluation.
Delaware County deputies recently captured the scene after the department rolled out the cameras to capture sensitive and often dangerous interactions with the public.
The program will cost the department more than $130,000 to start. And that doesn’t include the likely future hiring of a civilian employee to maintain records and coordinate their public release.
“It’s a costly endeavor,” said Delaware County Sheriff Russell Martin.
Law enforcement officers often are confronted by members of the public with smart phones with cameras. And Martin isn’t shy about facing them.
“It affirms that what the men and women do in the field day in and day out is the right thing,” he told reporters at an event Monday at the sheriff’s office.
Currently, about 10 deputies are using the pocket-size devices, worn on the outside of their uniform. Each Panasonic Arbitrator BWC costs about $1,369. By year’s end, Martin expects all 95 deputies to have them.
Delaware is now the 70th among Ohio’s 88 counties to deploy body cameras in some capacity, said Bob Cornwell, director of the Buckeye State Sheriffs Association.
It’s a trend that sheriffs expect to continue.
“They are of the belief that they will exonerate any allegation of wrongdoing against their employees 95 percent of the time,” said Cornwell. “For as much as we are blamed for doing our jobs wrong, this will show us what we’re doing right.”
While videos showing police shootings and officer misconduct have made recent headlines, violent crime and officer-involved shootings in Delaware County are rare.
Martin said the goal is to prevent such incidents.
Deputy Dereck Keller, who has used the cameras, points to the deterrent effect when a subject knows he is being recorded.
“The behavior changes,” Keller said. “Situations may start to escalate, you let them know that’s being recorded, and the behavior subsides.”
While a new camera policy is being implemented, Delaware County deputies will be given wide discretion over when the cameras are activated.
The Ohio legislature has introduced bills to help define public records for cameras and establish how long they must be kept.
That, combined with cost, is an ongoing concern among departments still considering their use. Storage will cost the Delaware County sheriff about $40,000 annually.
“The longer we have to keep the records, the more costly it is,” said Cornwell. “The more that is made public, the more you have to hire employees to redact and maintain that information.”