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Highlands Today

All Sheriff's Cruisers To Get Video Cameras

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By Jim  Konkoly | Highlands Today

Published: October 23, 2007

Before year's end, every Highlands County sheriff's deputy working road patrol will drive with a new crime fighting and traffic enforcement tool.

Video cameras will be installed in each of the more than 60 sheriff's cruisers used in road patrol within 30 to 60 days.

Sheriff Susan Benton's staff has been saving grant funds and income from housing out-of-county prisoners for nearly three years to fund the $300,000 project.

"Many agencies have had them for many years, and there is a lot of information out there as to how useful a tool it is to law enforcement," Benton said. "We just didn't have the funding for it. So, it became written into our strategic plan and we worked on (acquiring the funding)."

Benton said equipping every road patrol cruiser with the cameras has "comprehensive benefits."
"A lot of it has to do with evidence for good prosecutions, whether it's traffic or a major felony case," she said. "It's also a good way to handle complaints against officers, to be able to clearly see (what happened)."

Since before Benton took office as sheriff in January 2005, Highlands County has had only two patrol cars equipped with video cameras, according to Maj. Mark Schrader, who heads the sheriff's law enforcement division. He said commanders have wanted video cameras in all patrol cruisers for years.
"Funding was the reason why we didn't have them," he said.

Lisa McGehee, chief of staff for the sheriff, said personnel from the law enforcement, finance and information technology sections of the sheriff's office are reviewing bids and expect to recommend awarding a contract for the cruiser cameras in the next 10 days.

"We're going to be able to do this without spending any ad valorem (property tax) funds," McGehee said. "We've been saving for it because it's such a big project."

Schrader said capturing video evidence is the biggest, but not the only, benefit of the cameras, which will be mounted either on the dashboard or below the windshield rear-view mirror.

"We will capture what's going on at the scene of a traffic accident or a traffic violation or at the scene of a crime," he said.

"It's a great feature especially for traffic violations," he added. "Or you can be pulling up to a fight at an establishment, people having a melee out in the front, and you can capture all of that."
Schrader said the video cameras also can be a valuable tool for training.

"A lot of training classes actually come from video taken from dashboard cameras on patrol cars," he said.

"Another (use) will be capturing pursuits," he added. "When it goes to court, instead of saying someone ran three stop signs and forced four cars off the road, they can watch firsthand what happened and what the driving pattern was."

The value of an onboard cruiser camera was illustrated dramatically shortly after midnight on Jan. 31, 2005, when a hit-and-run driver struck Deputy Roger St. Laurent at about 60 mph when he was writing a speeding ticket on the shoulder of U.S. 27 just north of Avon Park.

St. Laurent suffered deep bruises and several cuts when the car's side view mirror and the back half of its quarter panel struck him, but he escaped serious injury. He happened to be using one of the two cruisers equipped with the dashboard camera.

"That video helped us identify the person who struck him," Benton said

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