OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — What started as a test run in December with just six officers is now permanent. As of 6 a.m. Monday, Overland Park Police began wearing body cameras.
“This journey started years ago,” Police Chief Frank Donchez said. “I mean this money has been budgeted since 2014.”
The Monday rollout, which cost the department $430,000, included the city’s storage server and 200 camera and was allocated in an improvement fund that had been planned five years in advance. Going forward, upkeep will be paid out of the police department’s general fund.
The annual upkeep is expected to cost is $90,000.
“We want them for increased transparency and accountability,” Donchez said. “A lot of things have changed in policing just within the last five to six years. There’s certainly been more of an outcry from the public for transparency and accountability. There’s been some high-profile incidents involving police that, quite honestly, haven’t been totally friendly to the police.”
Donchez said he believes the new departmentwide body cameras are one more step in holding that accountability as a public entity.
In Lenexa, Deputy Chief Dawn Layman spearheaded the effort a decade ago for every officer in her department to wear body cameras. It was one of the first police departments in the area to do so.
“It’s a plus for them,” Layman said of Overland Park’s effort. “I think they’re going to see the benefits in the end.”
Layman said most officers feel the body cameras are another tool in their arsenal of resources that they carry with them in the field.
“In my opinion, if you don’t outfit your officers with body worn cameras you’re doing them an injustice,” Layman said. “I’ve been in Lenexa 26 years, and I had to take a VHS tape in and out of the back of my car every night and put it on the shelf, so this was just a natural progression of technology. With the in car cameras we went from VHS to DVD”
And now many police departments store body camera footage virtually, in the cloud.
“There were some things that needed to get worked out,” Donchez said, “and we didn’t want to be the first ones to necessarily work that out.”
Nationwide, one of those concerns was over privacy.
Body camera policy in Overland Park follows the Kansas Open Records Act, and certain criteria within that law dictate when to release video.
In both Lenexa and Overland Park, if the body camera footage is not flagged or assigned to a case within 90 days of being recorded it drops off the system and is no longer kept in storage.
Kansas law states that law enforcement agencies must make body-camera footage accessible to the families of suspects shot and killed by police officers. The law went into effect in 2018 as a way to be more transparent.
