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One of the biggest police departments in the state intends to provide body cameras to every officer by the end of the year, three years after CalMatters reported that only 3% of California Highway Patrol officers wore them.
A $10 million plan to equip all CHP officers with body cameras was proposed in 2015 by now-retired Assemblymember Reginald Jones-Sawyer. Lawmakers decided on a $1 million, one-year experimental program. Almost 93,000 videos were taken by officers in that year, but the program was never extended.
According to a 2022 CalMatters piece, the CHP was well behind local police enforcement agencies in the pilot initiative, which had only resulted in 237 body cams across the agency. The agency stated at the time that it was concentrating on improving its dash cam system. Five months later, state legislators granted CHP’s budget request to purchase body cameras for every officer.
According to CHP spokesperson Jaime Coffee, approximately 2,400 officers in the Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Bay Area have received body-worn cameras thus far. According to her, all 7,600 cops should have their cams by March 2026.
According to Jones-Sawyer, this is the ideal illustration of it moving too slowly. I’ve always known that this must occur. I was only ten years too early.
The state Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board reports that highway patrol officers perform over 2 million stops annually. Outside of state highways, officers have also been employed for other purposes. In addition to fighting crime in Oakland and policing drag races, they have been employed during the federal government’s immigration raids in Los Angeles.
Research on whether body-worn cameras lessen police violence is few. A 2022 study did, however, find some indication that, after three years, police homicides were lower in agencies that used body cams than in those who did not.
State legislators have allocated CHP around $20 million for the new cameras since 2023, with an additional $5 million anticipated for continued support of the system.
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