Carrollton to purchase body cameras

By Carmen Ensinger

Carrollton City Council approved the purchase of eight body cameras for officers and three car cameras for patrol vehicles at the June 13 meeting.
Police Chief Jimmy Buchanan explained to the board that beginning Jan. 1, 2025, every police department in Illinois will be required to equip its officers with body cameras which must be activated any time they are out of their squad.
This mandate is part of the SAFE-T Act and small municipalities, such as Carrollton and the surrounding municipalities are the last to be forced to wear the body cams.
Since all of the local departments are required to purchase these body cameras, they went together to get a bid to purchase the cameras in bulk in hopes of getting a discount, which they did.
“We are going in with seven different departments, including Scott County Sheriff’s Department and the City of Winchester,” Buchanan said. “We got a couple of bids and we all decided to go with the bid from Digital Ally.”
To outfit every full-time officer and have one for a part-time officer and a camera for each squad, the city needs to purchase seven body cams and three cameras for the squad cars.
“We currently have cameras in our squad, but they are not compatible with these cameras,” Buchanan said. “These new cameras will sync-up with the body cameras. When we turn on our lights, everything will come on – the body cams and the car cams.”
Digital Ally presented two options to the city – to purchase them outright or to lease them over a five-year period.
“The advantage to leasing them is that if anything goes wrong, they will either fix them or replace them for free,” Buchanan said. “It also includes the cloud storage.”
The total cost for the seven body cams and 3 squad car cameras is $51,178, but under the lease program, the city can pay for it over the five-year period of the lease. The first year they would pay $14,069.20. The next four years are broken down into even payments of around $9,277 per year. This price also includes installation of the car cameras.
However, Buchanan had some good news to pass on to the council.
“Last year we received $5,000 from Spire to put towards these,” he said. “So, that would bring the initial payment down to around $9,000 the first year.”
Buchanan also said that he had applied for two different grants to go towards the cameras, but hadn’t heard back from them.
One alderman wondered if they shouldn’t wait to purchase the cameras until they hear back from the grants since the bid was good for 90 days.
However, it was pointed out that the reason they had sought bids this early was because they were concerned if they waited until the last minute that everyone would be ordering the cameras and they would not receive them in time.
The council decided to go ahead and purchase them now and gave Buchanan the go ahead and order them.