‘Video is truth.’ Fresno deputies will get body cameras as part of $3.2 million program
A federal grant for $430,000 will help the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office become the latest law enforcement agency to outfit its deputies with body-worn video cameras to record interactions with the public.
The Fresno County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted Tuesday to authorize Sheriff John Zanoni to accept the grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. The grant will go toward the purchase of 215 cameras for deputies primarily in the patrol division, but about 20 of the cameras will be used by correctional officers in the Fresno County Jail.
It was Zanoni’s second attempt at convincing the county supervisors to accept the grant. At the board’s April 11 meeting, supervisors expressed concern about the Sheriff’s Office being about $2 million over its 2022-23 budget, and voiced hesitation over the ongoing costs of maintaining a camera program beyond the purchase of the equipment itself. The board asked that the cost figures for the camera program be fine-tuned before returning to the board.
On Tuesday, Zanoni estimated that the program cost for the cameras — for managing recorded video, service and maintenance, technology support and more — would be about $3.2 million over a five-year period. Some of that is money the county already has in hand in the form of “innovation funds” for law enforcement, as well as funds set aside for the welfare of jail inmates that would be used for cameras deployed in the jail.
Zanoni, however, said he believed the upside of the cameras include potential reduction in legal costs associated with lawsuits against the county over such incidents as officer-involved shootings and other dealings with the public.
“That’s something I can’t make assumptions on,” Zanoni told the supervisors. “I don’t want to predict, but I can say that on a current lawsuit that we’ve been dealing with … this probably could have saved us well over $1 million.”
Within the central San Joaquin Valley, only Fresno and Kings counties don’t have body-worn cameras for their sheriff’s deputies, but, Zanoni added, “I have spoken personally to (Kings County) Sheriff (David) Robinson and they are in the process of getting them.”
Fresno County last large county in state to approve cameras
Sheriff’s departments in Madera, Mariposa, Tulare and Kern counties all have camera programs, as do the nearby cities of Fresno, Clovis, Madera, Visalia and Porterville for their police officers.
Among California’s most populous counties, Fresno is the last one to move toward getting body cameras for its deputies, Zanoni said. “We are the last significant sized agency in California who does not have these when it comes to county sheriff’s offices,” he said.
“Video is truth,” he added, “and it is time that we kind of catch up with the times.”
Some civil rights advocates last month expressed some misgivings about law enforcement officers using body-worn cameras, including the potential for their misuse.
But Zanoni characterized the cameras as a means of building transparency, accountability and trust for deputies.
“Speaking to a lot of my counterparts (from other cities and counties), you have a much more efficient resolution of many citizen complaints because once there’s body camera footage, it’s no longer a ‘he said, she said’ or ‘he said, he said’ thing,” Zanoni said. “We actualy have facts; we have proof that usually can exonerate an officer, so it’s a huge benefit to our deputies that are out there in the field.”
As part of Zanoni’s request, supervisors also approved the addition of an information technology analyst for the sheriff’s office to oversee the management of the cameras and software on a day-to-day basis.
