St. Anthony Police and Fremont County Sheriff | St. Anthony's body and in-car cameras

Body cameras are the surveillance technology with the best public case. They record the officer as well as the person stopped, and departments and civil liberties groups have both argued for them. What is worth watching in St. Anthony is not whether the cameras exist but how the city decided to pay for five years of them.

Bought on report, not on motion

On 10 October 2024 the Chief told the Council the cameras in the patrol cars were no longer supported. He described an incident where a body camera had stamped a recording 2014, which he then had to explain in court. The maker had been bought out by Motorola, and he had met with Motorola and with another company.

The department had picked LensLock. They gave the best price, recordings would download to a cloud the city attorney could reach, the company would store the records and offered a redaction policy, and the pricing would be $18,000 in the first year and $15,000 in each of the four years after.^[1]

That paragraph sits under DEPARTMENT REPORTS, after the Council had finished its general business and approved its invoices. There is no motion, no second and no vote anywhere in the minutes of that meeting or afterwards.

The cameras arrived the next month and the car cameras were fitted in December.^[2] By then the city had moved its office onto a fibre connection, because, as the Clerk told the Council, the new camera system was already up and the cameras took a significant amount of bandwidth.^[6]

The county bought the first ones

St. Anthony’s first body cameras did not come out of a city budget at all.

In September 2015 the Board of County Commissioners signed the 2015 State Homeland Security Program Grant for $28,756.83. The minutes describe what the county’s emergency management coordinator would do with it: buy body cameras for the officers in the City of St. Anthony, and a generator for the fire station in Ashton. The motion passed unanimously.^[3]

Four years later the same coordinator did it again. In October 2019 the Chief told the Council he had been working with the county emergency management official on a grant for body cameras, that six new ones were coming, and that the money was from the Department of Homeland Security.^[4] Two weeks later he reported taking possession of six WatchGuard cameras, which he said saved the city about $7,300.^[5]

This is worth noticing on its own. A city police department’s recording equipment was bought twice by a county officer, on federal grants, through a body no St. Anthony voter elects. The decisions appear in the county’s minutes as grant acceptances, which is not where anyone looking for a camera purchase would think to look.