Arnold Downing

By Josh Davis, Associate Editor

(Oct. 18, 2018) The Berlin Town Council last Tuesday endorsed a five-year, $36,700 contract with Axon Enterprise Inc. for police body cameras and cloud-based storage of the videos they capture.

Police Chief Arnold Downing said the cameras would be used by “all 10 of our road police officers.”

He said the cloud-based storage system would hold onto all videos for 120 days – the same amount of time as police in Wicomico County and Salisbury. He said evidentiary footage is immediately “grabbed and archived,” and kept longer.

“If we’re talking about criminal proceedings, we’d have to confirm with the state’s attorney prior to destroying it,” Downing said, adding an advantage to cloud-based storage was that state’s attorney workers would be able to access it.

He said the body cameras would be manually operated and police officers would also have access to the videos, but would not be able to delete or change the files.

Before implementing the cameras, Downing said the town would have to draft a usage policy, which would have to be run by Town Attorney Dave Gaskill.

He said implementation could start by the end of the year.

The Town Council voted unanimously to approve the contract.