Kansas City Police Department inches toward equipping officers with body cameras

The Kansas City Police Department has taken another step in its efforts to equip its officers with body-worn cameras by seeking bids to purchase them along with new in-vehicle cameras.

On Tuesday, responding to media inquiries over the past week and a half after officers shot and killed three people, the Police Department released a 62-page request for proposal for 1,000 body cameras and an in-vehicle camera system. The RFP was dated June 11. Companies have until Aug. 21 to submit a purchase proposal.

Kansas City Police Board President Nathan Garrett said there is no set timetable on when the body cameras would be purchased and given to officers. The board's immediate goal is to replace the in-vehicle video for each of the department's fleet of nearly 340 patrol vehicles. The current dashboard system is outdated and needs to be replaced.

The board is hoping to broker a better deal by including the body cameras as part of its bid request. The proposal calls for the body cameras to operate in coordination with the dashboard camera system.

"Our primary focus is making work what we already have right now," Garrett said. "We have got to have the in-car camera system. We are hoping to combine those two so we can get a reduced cost."

Money for the new in-vehicle cameras would be funded through the Police Department's current operating budget.

Acquiring body-worn cameras remains a top priority for the police board, he said. However, the police board has not determined an overall start-up cost or a funding source for the equipment and storage.

"I don’t think that it is anything that is going to happen immediately," Garrett said. "We certainly don’t have a deadline on it but it has our attention."

There is no money in the current city budget for body cameras. Mayor Pro Tem Scott Wagner said the RFP was released to determine possible costs.

"What they've done is put out an RFP essentially to get pricing," said Wagner, chair of the City Council's finance and governance committee. "What they are doing is trying to figure out how to budget over time to get this sort of equipment once there is an answer to the RFP."

Community leaders and civil rights organizations have repeatedly demanded Kansas City officers to wear body cameras in the aftermath of a number of fatal officer-involved shootings of unarmed citizens.

The Police Department is currently investigating three fatal officer-involved shootings that occurred earlier this month in the Northland and at Barney Allis Plaza downtown.

Police officials have said they support the idea because it would increase officer safety and enhance accountability. But they also warned the equipment would quickly become outdated.

"We just have to see the numbers, understand the logistics and figure out how we are going to maintain the system and handle the storage," Garrett said. "It is just those different pieces that we need to be informed on. We have crossed the Rubicon on whether we support body cameras."

Last year, department officials presented a $6 million price tag to cover the initial start-up costs, equipment upgrades, storage expenses and hiring additional workers to manage the effort and to respond open records request for the video recordings.

Garrett said those numbers have likely increased.

In 2016, the Police Department conducted a 90-day study in which they equipped 25 officers with body cameras. The test helped police officials determine how they would store footage from the cameras and whether equipment upgrades would be needed.

During that pilot program, the department had an average of 147 video recordings that used roughly 82,000 megabytes of data recorded each day.

Garrett said there would be a significant cost to store the video recordings from officers. While there is no estimate on how much that would cost, the expenses would be shared with Kansas City as part of a joint technology initiative between the two groups.

In recent years, the public has called for law enforcement to release dashboard and body camera recordings following fatal police shootings in Milwaukee; Tulsa, Okla.; and Charlotte, N.C. Those shootings led to widespread, sometimes-violent protests.

Several area law enforcement agencies, including the Clay County Sheriff’s Office, Lenexa police and the Johnson County Sheriff's Office, already have equipped their officers with body cameras.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City is among the local groups that have called for greater police accountability.

SCLC president the Rev. Vernon P. Howard said Tuesday that he wasn't aware that the Police Department began seeking bids for the body cameras but welcomed the move.

"This is a positive step among many needed steps in order to confronting systemic enforcement brutality and the dire need for more transparency," Howard said. "We will want to see the specific policies and guidelines governing officer usage, internal investigative use, and prosecutorial use by the courts.

"This technology should be used to the fullest extent to monitor enforcement activity in order to celebrate good actors and hold bad ones accountable," he said.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City has called for body cameras in the past in seeking accountability for an officer who in 2013 fatally shot 24-year-old Ryan Stokes in a parking lot near 12th and McGee streets in downtown Kansas City. He was unarmed at the time, but police found a handgun in a nearby car. Stokes' mother has filed a federal lawsuit against the Police Department.

"While this move is later than should have been and questions remain about usage, we are pleased with this direction and still much work needs to be done," Howard said.

Lora McDonald, executive director of More2, welcomes body cameras but has reservations about how the Police Department would use them.

"It’s not foolproof that they’ll have them on," McDonald said. "We have departments where they have them and then, lo and behold, they don’t have them on. There have to be protocols around who’s responsible."

This story was originally published June 26, 2018 at 5:23 PM.