Some large NC law enforcement agencies still don't use bodycams

The Wake County Sheriff's Office and the Durham County Sheriff's Office are in the process of outfitting their deputies with bodycams.

Wake County officials said their rollout could happen as early as next month, after commissioners provided funding to match a federal grant to obtain them. Durham County commissioners in April approved spending more than $1 million for bodycams, and officials plan to have them in use early next year.

Former Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews said Tuesday that he's surprised the agencies didn't have bodycams in use by now.

How body-worn cameras and other technologies are impacting policing

"I think that the officers being outfitted with any type of recording device will assist them in doing their job and keep them safe from complaints that come in," said Andrews, who noted that he started a pilot program with bodycams five years ago and planned to expand it, but he lost his re-election bid in 2018.

WRAL News contacted 29 area law enforcement agencies and found the majority already use bodycams. Some smaller departments have had them for a decade or so, while the Raleigh Police Department adopted them in 2018, the Fayetteville Police Department in 2016 and the Orange County Sheriff's Office in 2019.

The only agencies that told WRAL they don't have bodycams are the Henderson Police Department and the sheriff's offices in Wake, Durham, Cumberland Johnston, Robeson and Vance counties.

"You’d think that some larger agencies may start implementing, even if not 100 percent of their officers, but some of their officers having body-worn cameras," said Hunter Boehme, an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at North Carolina Central University who studies bodycams.

Audit: Durham police officers routinely disregard policies on bodycam videos

Boehme said cost is likely the limiting factor for bodycam usage.

"The expense of implementing body-worn cameras ... can get up into the millions of dollars," he said.

Wake and Durham counties, for example, each have hundreds of deputies who need to be outfitted, in addition to the server space needed to store the videos. The Johnston County Sheriff's Office explicitly cited expense as the reason the agency has no plans to get bodycams.

"I think that body-worn cameras can protect both the officer and the citizen, and it provides transparency and accountability," Boehme said. "The jury is still out as to whether body-worn cameras actually reduce force [by officers]."