STEVENS POINT, Wis. (WSAU) - Police in Stevens Point will have different dash cameras shortly.
Police Chief Kevin Ruder says the new dash cameras will be able to record audio and video as you might expect, but there will also be an additional feature that should improve service. “We’re going to have a GPS put on them so we know where squad cars are for better delivery of service, and knowing where our officers are at any particular time.”
The GPS feature of the new cameras will allow dispatchers and command staff to see exactly where each police vehicle is located, making it more efficient to assign calls.
The Chief says the old system had plenty of bells and whistles, but it failed to work quite often. “It had more of your automatic downloads and so forth, in which I-T is never working 100%, so we ended up going with more of a basic system that uses more manual labor to get it into a disk and so forth, which makes it more reliable, and we need the reliability for cases.”
The city’s eight marked squad cars are having the new dash camera systems installed this week. It costs about $5,000 to equip each squad with the new system.