BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

CANTON -- The St. Lawrence County Sheriff’s Office is in the beginning stages of equipping officers with body cameras, and a few uniform road patrol officers are using them now.

Sheriff Brooks Bigwarfe said he and department leaders have been looking into the cameras for months.

I’m for body cams. I think they do a lot of good things for our office,” he said. He noted five areas where he thinks the cameras would benefit deputies: transparency, accountability, data collection, evidence collection and looking into use or force or abuse complaints.

“That’ll all be on there,” he said. “Part of it is officers and community interaction. It gives better documentation to help confirm the nature of events, and accounts by officers and county citizens.”

The sheriff said it isn’t as simple as just putting a camera on a deputy, pressing record and going out into public.

“There’s some logistics involved we definitely have to educate ourselves on,” he said, adding that they require training. “We want to have them knowing this is how they operate, this is how you download the information, this is how you retain it.”

The footage is stored on a cloud server administered by the vendor. He says it shouldn’t be stored on the county’s IT server, since the data includes potential evidence of crimes.

Bigwarfe has drawn up a policy, which he says is “templated on the (Department of Criminal Justice Services) state requirements … policy for body cams.”

The next step is for the sheriff to ask the county legislature for $50,000 to $70,000 for the actual recording devices, also pays for IT costs like software, cloud storage space and maintenance fees.

“I have to be cognizant of the budget and the price,” he said.

He wants to get his 33 uniform road patrol deputies outfitted first, who he noted are “with the public 24/7.” He is hopeful that could happen by the first of the year.

“I’m just trying to get a base right now, and the cost is quite expensive,” Bigwarfe said.

He said the body cameras aren’t mandated under the statewide policing reforms, “but it’s a strong suggestion.”

“This isn’t like a couple days process. When police reform was out there several months ago, I tasked my undersheriff to start researching with the supervisors … We’ve been working on this for months,” Bigwarfe said. “Our undersheriff and admin have done a great job of researching vendors, researching logistics, researching policies, all the things we have to deal with to get this.”