Starting this November, Bell County residents will start seeing Sheriff Deputies wearing some new gear.
“It holds us accountable for what we do,” said Lt. Perry Moose with the Bell County Sheriff’s Department.
The Bell County Commissioners Court voted Monday morning to approve new body cameras for the sheriff’s department. They’ll be going from an L3 system to Axon, a company that already makes their tasers.
“Seemed to be a much better product and will be a lot more reliable and a little easier to transfer than our current syste,” said Lt. Moose.
The contract includes 76 cameras, two for each officer, accessories, a maintenance plan and an evidence storage system.
“This is stored through the cloud, so we buy licensing through the cloud and its pretty much unlimited,” said Lt. Moose.
All at a cost of just over $39,000 every year for the next five years.
“I hope it’s a positive thing, I think with our society now a days everybody kind of expects it,” said Lt. Moose.
“With everything we see in the news now a days and all the accusations made I think it’ll protect the officers as well,” said Killeen resident Bob Bradberry.
“I don’t know if it’s about the community feeling safer as it is the officer wearing the body cam, it’s going to help in all ways I think,” said Belton resident and owner of Sarsaparilla Saloon and Cafe, Tammy Wilson.’
So how are they different than the camera’s the deputies already use? They turn on by themselves.
“If something happens real quick and you don’t have time to remember ‘hey I need to reach down there and turn it on’ it’s kind of a fail safe and it turns it on for you,” said Lt. Moose.
It records up to 12 hours and beeps every two minutes to remind the officers to turn them off.
“Sometimes we clear a scene and we forget to turn them off and now we have an hour of riding around in a car cause we forgot to turn it off,” said Lt. Moose.
The department already has a date set up for training with the new system and they hope to have the officers wearing them by November 16th.
