Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett announced a pilot project Feb. 2 that will require deputies to wear body cameras to record daily interactions with community members.
The program will start with the Dane County Sheriff’s Office West Precinct, which spans most county townships west of Madison. The year-long program will be used as a measure of accountability as well as an opportunity to find areas for improvement within the department, according to Dane County Captain Kerry Porter.
“We'll take a look at those [recordings] and [look at] what kinds of things we can do better,” Porter told The Daily Cardinal. “Are there training opportunities? Do we need to increase the communication skills of our deputies? Are things going really well?”
The pilot project will serve as a future guideline for how to implement the technology in a way that best serves the citizens of Dane County, according to Barrett.
The project was first proposed in 2015 and was assigned a subcommittee of community members to research requirements and instances of body-camera use. The project was originally rejected due to doubts about effectiveness and high costs.
Since the original proposal, a 2017 OIR report promoting the pilot project and the creation of a Police Body-Worn Camera Feasibility Review Committee in 2020 encouraged the Sheriff's Department to move forward with the project.
“Sometimes it's better not to be the one paving the way…other agencies have gone through a lot,” Porter said. “We've done a lot of research with policies from other agencies around the country [looking at] best practices and those things [that] have been developed.”
The Sheriff's Department received approval for the project in November and budgeted $320,000 for the technology in the 2024 Dane County Budget. The policy is currently in the process of being finalized, and several public information sessions will be held for questions and concerns, according to Porter.
The prospect of continuing the technology after the pilot project largely depends on its success, Porter said.
“Measurements of success [include] accountability, transparency, training issues, those types of things,” Porter said. “We don't have a definitive measurement of success, but we hope that'll come with time as we go through it.”
The public information sessions will be held on Feb. 15 and Feb. 29 at 6:00 p.m. at the Middleton Town Hall at 7555 Old Sauk Road for community members to learn more about the project.
