Eight St. Louis County Police Departments Will Get Body Cameras

ST. LOUIS COUNTY, MO — Eight municipal police departments across St. Louis County are partnering up to purchase body cameras for about 260 police officers, the Post-Dispatch reports. The agencies were awarded a $400,000 federal grant to purchase the cameras, and by sharing video storage costs, the departments hope to make the cameras even more affordable over the long term.

Among the police departments participating are Bellefontaine Neighbors, Brentwood, Bridgeton, Clayton, Moline Acres, Town and County, Richmond Heights and the University of Missouri St. Louis campus police force. They hope to deploy the body cameras by September.

Body cameras have become more popular with police forces in the wake of an epidemic of police shootings as a way to build community trust, and citizens have increasingly demanded them.

Last year, officials in St. Louis approved a plan to equip metro police officers with 1,300 body cameras, provided free for one year by the company Axon, formerly Taser International.

But research by a team of scientists, acting under the authority of the Washington D.C. mayor's office and the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department found no significant difference in the number of citizen complaints or use of force between officers equipped with body cameras and those without.

And cases like the trial of Raymond Tensing, who shot unarmed black motorist Samuel DuBose in 2015, highlight the difficulty of convicting police officers of murder, even when video of the incident exists. Charges against Tensing were dropped when two juries were both unable to reach a verdict.

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