Urban County Council moves to put police body cameras back on budget
Last week, Lexington’s Urban County Council cut the $600,000 of funding because they said the plan to implement the cameras was unclear. They said the department did not yet have a plan to store the video or have policies on how officers were supposed to wear them.
The city said on Tuesday that they had met with a company that can handle the storage and are ready to move forward with the purchase of the cameras. The police chief said they will work on the policies while the cameras are on order.
The issue of police body cameras has been on the table for a while in Lexington. ABC 36 News reported, over a year ago, that the police department received a grant to test body cameras and were looking at different options to equip all patrol officers with cameras. But, in multiple interviews, police stopped short of ever providing a timeline of when cameras would become the norm.
With nationwide attention turning towards the use of police body cameras, Mayor Jim Gray put the item in his budget in early 2015 for approval by the Urban County Council.
Tuesday’s meeting was only a work session, the council voted to put the issue on its agenda for its first reading on July 2nd. Then it must get a second reading on July 7th before it is officially added back to the budget.
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