MONROE — With an eye on keeping up with new technologies, the Monroe Police Department will soon have a new batch of squad-car mounted cameras.

The council approved spending about $39,000 for seven new, Panasonic, dash camera systems, which should cover nearly the entire fleet of police cruisers, according to Chief Fred Kelley. The main advantage of the new dash-mounted units is their ability to sync with the department’s body-worn cameras.

That means there is not a second video source to gather images for big cases — either as evidence or as discovery for defense attorneys. The result is easier access and sorting of video evidence, which Kelley said the department keeps for about seven years either on its own computers and servers, burned onto discs or loaded onto thumb drives. 

Defense attorneys routinely request video evidence — from cars and body cameras — when preparing court cases for their clients.

“The new cameras are the same technology,” he said. “Technology improves so the ones we’re getting will be six years newer.”

Typically, the dash cameras turn on automatically when the lights and siren are activated, and the newer body-worn cameras will turn on when officers get out of their squad cars. 

Monroe still has some older, body-worn Vievu cameras that have a plastic cover over the aperture of the camera that must be manually slid into place for them to work. In some larger departments, the body worn cameras can be activated manually but with a 30-second or so delay — meaning the camera retains information from 30 seconds prior to the manual activation.

In the early 2000s, Monroe was one of the first departments to deploy body-worn cameras for officers, after it landed a state grant to fund their initial purchase. Even today, Kelley said, some larger departments such as Madison still have not managed to roll them out.

Kelley said officers were initially reluctant to wear cameras because of the fear of too much scrutiny and micromanagement, but nowadays cops have seen the advantage of them — especially after an incident early on in Monroe when a citizen complained about his treatment by an officer. After reviewing just 22 seconds of video in that particular case, he added, the citizen dropped his complaint toward the officer.

“It’s (dash and body-cameras) probably has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees,” he said. “To me it was an easy choice to go to (video).”

Police can film citizens without consent because Wisconsin is one of 38 states (along with Washington D.C.) that are known as “one-party consent” states, allowing the camera operator to record without informing those being recorded. And it works both ways — a citizen can use a smartphone or camera to film an officer during any kind of police contact if it does not interfere with an investigation and is outside the borders of police tape at a crime scene.

Kelley said he is committed to providing his officers with the latest tech, even though it is a never-ending process of upgrades. Next, he will be looking to update the computers in squad cars to units that have touch screens and can do just about everything dispatch can do from their work computers, right in the squad.

“They don’t last very long,” he said. “If something is right, we will see and hear it and if something is wrong, we will see or hear or see it.”