Minnesota State Patrol Gets Body Cameras

(KNSI) – Minnesota State Patrol officers will start wearing body cameras on a full-time basis starting next week.

Colonel Matt Langer of the Minnesota State Patrol held a press conference Thursday demonstrating the new equipment made possible by funding from the Minnesota Legislature.

“So this week we’ll have 40 of our state troopers in the Golden Valley district trained and issued the body-worn cameras. Troopers have over 400,000 interactions with members of the public throughout the year statewide and the body-worn cameras give us an opportunity to have an undeniable record of what occurred roadside to augment what happens with the squad video system.”

The new video systems will sync the body warn cameras and the cameras in the squad cars. The video will be uploaded every night from the squad car and will be available instantly. The project should be completed in May of 2022.

“Our deployment starts today. It’s going to go through May of 2022. One of the key differences for us is at the same time that the troopers are being issued their body-worn camera, they’re also having a new squad video system installed or retrofitted into their squad car, that installation takes time, but it’s really necessary so that if you have a traffic stop, that the body-worn camera and the squad video are entirely synced together so that we don’t have two different videos on two different systems. That takes time and energy to complete.”

Colonel Langer stated there’s quite a bit of excitement in the force surrounding the implementation of this new technology.

“I’d like to think that every single interaction with a state trooper is wonderful. The reality is some of them are more difficult than others. And although we’d like to think every state trooper is perfect, we’re also human beings as are members of the public. The interaction captured on body-worn cameras will hold everyone accountable and it’ll have a record of what actually occurred between the trooper and the member of the public.”

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