Alberta to mandate police body cameras — but who’s paying?

A criminologist says Alberta's plan to make all police services in the province use body cameras could come with prohibitive costs and take a long time to put in place.

A criminologist says Alberta’s plan to make all police services in the province use body cameras could come with prohibitive costs and take a long time to put in place.

Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis announced Tuesday that body cams would protect officers and the public, and help make decisions made by police officers more transparent.

The United Conservative Party government will work with the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police on funding, logistics and when the cameras will roll out, he said.

It’s expected to be another three or four months before a draft proposal is ready. There was no immediate estimate on how much the plan would cost.

Doug King, a justice studies professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said body cameras are a good idea, but there are questions that need to be answered, including who would pay the high cost of storing the video footage.

“It can be prohibitively expensive,” King said Wednesday. “That’s a heck of a lot of storage space that has to be maintained because usually, you have to maintain the body cam images for about two years or more because that’s how long things take to adjudicate in the criminal courts.

“You can’t then dump it on a town like Taber, Alta., that has 26 officers and say, ‘You’re going to have to do this. We’re going to mandate it but we’re going to leave you holding the cost of it.'”

King said it looks as though everyone is on board with the plan but thinking that every police service in Alberta will be adopting the cameras any time soon is unrealistic.