The Sunbury, Oh., officers raced to the high-priority call, where parents were fighting and a young child was present. The officers quickly learned that a gun was in the kitchen and went in to get it. A tense situation was easily defused; that is, until the father accused the officers of illegally searching his home and seizing weapons and a knife, says the Columbus Dispatch. If not for the officers' eyeglass-mounted video cameras, the case might have brought charges of police abuse, Fourth Amendment violations and a lengthy investigation. Instead, video from the pencil-size cameras, downloaded back at the station, showed the officers simply doing their job.
“A lot of times, we're able to close these cases out in five minutes,” said Police Chief Pat Bennett. It has been a year since Sunbury became the first central Ohio town using body cameras. When dash-mounted video cameras began failing two years ago in his five police cars, Bennett sought alternatives. Replacements cost about $7,000 each. So he contacted Arizona-based Taser International, which offered him eight body cameras at no cost if Sunbury agreed to store the video on Taser's computers at a cost of $9,000 a year for three years. After that, the department will assess their value. “I just wanted to get video back in our system,” Bennett said. “This is the way things are going. Technology is driving this. You almost hear now in court that if it's not on video, it didn't happen.”