At last, county sheriff’s deputies roll out body cameras
WatchGuard Video photo of the company’s typical body camera.
By Bobby Bryant, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Notice anything different about the Darlington County sheriff’s deputies you’ve seen on patrol this week?
All the county’s patrol deputies, investigators and any deputies who interact with the public finally have their body cameras.
It’s the payoff of an effort that Darlington County Sheriff Tony Chavis began in January 2017, said Chavis’ spokesman Lt. Robby Kilgo. As of the end of last week, Kilgo said, the Sheriff’s Office had 65 body cameras “in the field” and another 10 in case they are needed.
“Our body-camera program is fully implemented,” Kilgo said. “ … That is a promise (the sheriff) made – that our deputies would have body cameras – and now they do.”
Grants from the state ($112,000) and federal government paid the $122,000 cost of the program, Kilgo said.
The $112,000 grant came through in 2017, but a series of delays and problems with the original company hired to supply the cameras and equipment to store the cameras’ huge amounts of data resulted in frustration for the Sheriff’s Office.
The original company, L3 Mobile Vision, blamed production defects for the major delays, Kilgo said at the time. The company also reportedly was upgrading their body cameras into a newer, better version, and the Sheriff’s Office waited for the “next-generation” cameras to come off the assembly line.
But, Kilgo said at the time, L3 Mobile Vision was still mired in research-and-development issues and had “not even begun to roll those cameras out.”
The Sheriff’s Office eventually switched over to another company, WatchGuard Video Systems, Kilgo said. Things went much more smoothly after that. In February, Kilgo said, WatchGuard shipped the Sheriff’s Office all 75 of the body cameras it had ordered.
Since then, Kilgo said, the Sheriff’s Office had been working with WatchGuard representatives on the technical issues of getting the equipment set up and working to train deputies in how to use the system.
Last Thursday, Kilgo told the News & Press that the body-camera system had been fully rolled out.
Texas-based WatchGuard describes itself as “the leading provider of mobile video solutions for law enforcement, having supplied in-car video systems and body-worn cameras along with evidence-management software to approximately one-third of all law enforcement agencies in the United States and Canada.”