Sheriff’s Office installs cameras for vehicles, officers

A two-year long project by the Sampson County Sheriff’s Department has finally came to fruition as installation of new state-of-the-art equipment got underway recently.

Vehicles across the department were being fitted Friday, June 14 with cameras covering the front and rear views of each. Body cameras, another implementation, will be issued for each law enforcement officer as well. Along with those new technologies will be the introduction of a new wireless data feature that will allow for real-time video footage to be recorded to help more accurately capture incidents and evidence.

“As far as the system, it’s called LensLock and Cradlepoint is the company to supply the wireless data,” explained Sheriff’s Lt. Marcus Smith.

“What Cradlepoint will allow us to do is take the video footage from the field and put it on LensLocks’ cloud server in real time, so it’s stored as evidence. It also supplies the officers with internet in their car for their laptops so they can do their reports quicker. It also provides location so we know where the car is at at all times.

“That’s what’s going to help us with stuff like dispatch, which will better assist us in knowing which car is best to send or who is closest to an incident, that’s kind of the short of it. Also, the officers will have a body camera and that will, of course, record an interaction that the officer has with with the public or whomever, and then the in-car cameras record anything such as traffic stops or anything of that nature.”

While Smith, who serves as lieutenant of Administrative Services within the Sheriff’s Department, said he was excited about the potential good these new cameras could bring, he acknowledged that there are some who weren’t exactly enthused at first. “Even so, the value this tech brings to the table for the safety of both citizens and law enforcement is far beyond worth it,” he attested.

“In some ways, there’s some officers that think this is like a Big Brother thing and, unfortunately, there’s probably other agencies out there to push it as just that, but our intent is the opposite,” Smith stressed. “This is a safety mechanism for the officer; they can supply evidence in real time and it gives you an actual account of the events that happen. It also should be comforting to the public to know that they (officers) do have cameras and they are recording what’s taking place in real-time.

“For me, I’ve had a camera before, but I remember back when there were VHS tapes in the trunk of a car so I always found cameras to be helpful, more so than not. “It’s been a little bit of a learning curve on how to activate them, when to activate, remembering to turn it off when you’re done with whatever encounter you have, but either way, it’s gonna be very helpful.

“Nothing tells the better story than what a camera can capture. You can write the best report in the world, but a video, that tells the story.”

Of the cameras now being put in place Smith highlighted that there were 81 in total, 76 of those being body cameras, not quite enough for the entire force.

“We’ve wanted cameras for some time. We’ve ended up with 81 — there’s 81 in-car cameras and, of those, there’s 76 body cameras. Naturally that’s not 81, so what’s the difference? Smith posed. “Well, the difference is the spare cars, so the spare car doesn’t have a body camera, so when officers are in the spare car, they’ll take their body cameras with them and it’ll pair up automatically and it’s like they never left.

”Now unfortunately, we didn’t have enough to do all vehicles in the sheriff’s office. Admin wasn’t included, investigators were not, there just wasn’t enough funding to do that, but we are gonna be able to do some transport vans so people transporting inmates will have that live view so if something were, unfortunately, to happen, you’d have video there.”

“We put a big dent in it, and so that’s where we are now.”

Some of the many other functions Smith said, that the new system allows includes the cameras activating automatically when detecting speeds over 80 miles an hour or crashes, the presence of fighting and with key words. It even auto responds to gunshots.

“It’s a very good system, and the good thing is they will be able to tag that incident with their OCA from their reports,” Smith said. “When they write a report, they’ll be able to tag that video as evidence with that OCA so it kind of all links together. They can actually send the link to the DA’s office, they don’t have to download a video to a jump drive or to a CD. The DA’s office can sit there, open it right up, watch it, play it in court and do whatever they need to do with it. So needless to say, it’s pretty state of the art.”

Funding for the cameras wasn’t initially planned but then, in 2022, Sheriff Jimmy Thornton reached out, on a whim, to the state Legislature for aid. It was an idea the sheriff said came about after randomly finding out the department had received $1 million from the state for a new storage building requested by the county commissioners.

“It became apparent to me that the county had been fortunate in getting funding from the state on prior projects,” Thornton said. “One being our new building out here which the county had requested a million dollars for to get us a building for storage. At the time all we had was the National Guard Armory and that’s where we stored all of our firearms that we have to seize and old case files that we have to hold on to forever.

“So the county, unbeknown to me, asked for a million dollars for us to have a building, and well, the county got it. That would have been in 2021. I had no knowledge of that until I was looking through the finalized and approved state budget and I saw where we got it. I’m glad we did.”

That’s what sparked Thornton’s attempt to get funding for the cameras.

“I said to myself, well shoot, if the county can ask for money which they’ve got for projects then, what the heck, I’ll shoot in the dark and ask for funding for these cameras,” he stated.

Thornton contacted Rep. William Brisson and Sen. Brent Jackson soon after and his plea was met with great success, over $1 million’s worth.

“That would have been in June ‘22, so it’s been two years ago now,” Thornton remarked. “As luck would have it, I asked for $1.2 million and Rep. Brisson got me $1 million and Sen. Jackson got me $200,000 so we got the money. Of course, it’s been sitting there now for two years and it’s taken us a long time to get where we are. There’s more behind the scenes stuff, for lack of a better word, for infrastructure and the like that put this all on hold.

“The funding paid for all the equipment but there was just so much other stuff we had to do as well, such as, accommodate the equipment itself, cover maintenance related fees, contracts and the like. It took much longer than we may have expected or wanted, but we’re here now.”

With cameras now installed, Smith is anticipating the camera installation process to be complete this week.

“They hope to be finished by next Thursday (June 20),” he said last week. “They’ve installed, I’m gonna guess, probably a third of them so far and, of that third, they’re recording, but they are not fully operational yet. They’re not uploading to the cloud yet because we’re still waiting on some technical behind the scenes stuff with the IT department.”

Smith added his own kudos to Brisson and Jackson.

“Really, there’d be no way we could’ve done this without their help,” Smith attested.

Thornton added, “We’ve gotten a lot of funding from outside sources, and it really saved the taxpayers in this county.”

”I do want to emphasize, like the sheriff said, how grateful we are for the legislature to give us the money to fund this project,” Smith chimed back in. “Also our IT Director Chris Rayner’s patience and hard work, trying to help us on the back end to get the technology going. And, of course, thanks to LensLock and Cradlepoint for providing us the technology and equipment to better protect our officers and the people; it took awhile, but it’s all worked out.”