The Village of South Jacksonville Police Department is going into a third and final phase of updating its camera systems all around the department.
Village Police Chief Eric Hansell says that the upgrades began in 2022 when the department upgraded its body-worn cameras and tasers with the company Axon, and then the worked continued with their in-car cameras the following: “We upgraded the in-car cameras so they would fully integrate with the body-worn cameras. Then, we picked up ALPRs [Automatic License Plate Readers]. Our third and final phase is transitioning fully to Axon as our booking room camera. We only have one booking room, unlike other bigger departments that have multiples. The system that we were using was an older HiteVision system that was just having connectivity issues. It had its own hardware and stored everything in house on the actual DVR inside of it. With this upgrade, it is going to inner-link everything together and all of the systems will work as one.”
Hansell says digital footage can then be updated to a single cloud location for digital access to other police departments, the State’s Attorney’s Office, the Illinois State Police, IDNR Conservation Police, or even the FBI. Hansell says it will also help the department to be in compliance with state statute if they need to interview a person on suspicion of certain types of alleged crimes: “State statute makes it mandatory for us to record certain offenses. For instance, if we have a first-degree murder suspect, involuntary manslaughter, DUI, induced homicide, aggravated arson, armed robbery – certain felonies like that require by statute to do mandatory recording for interviews. We have to have a reliable system to do that. That’s why we are looking at this third phase to get all of our systems up to industry standard.”
Hansell says the final phase of the project is being paid for out of the police department’s DUI seizure fund. The funds are collected by the local court systems during DUI arrests and during civil forfeiture for other offenses. The cost for the interview room camera system is just over $44,000 and will be completely covered by that fund. A final vote to purchase the system is expected for approval by the Village Board on Thursday night.