The Cedar Falls Police Department is asking for the public’s help in getting all of their police officers equipped with body cameras.
Public Safety Director and Police Chief Jeff Olson says the department bought around 15 body cameras last year after raising around $10,000 in private funds, but they need more.
“We’ve run into several situations where we didn’t have enough cameras. We’ve run into situations where officers have to recharge those, so they put them in chargers and another officer picks them up before they are recharged and batteries running dead prematurely,” Olson says.
Olson says they’ve found other times when they needed more cameras. He says they’ve had situations where officers are off duty and called in and they don’t have cameras to use. “We’ve had some real serious calls that they’ve responded to where they haven’t have cameras. In this day and age that’s really not an acceptable practice, we really need to have cameras for every officer,” according to Olson. Olson says there are 40 full-time officers as well as reserve officers and those on-call.
He’s hoping residents will help the department in fundraising on their a Go Fund Me page, or residents can make donations at city hall. The body cameras will cost around $30,000.
(Reporting by Scott Fenzloff, KCNZ, Cedar Falls)