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BACKUS - Sheriff Tom Burch will conduct a public hearing at the 9 a.m. Nov. 1 Cass County Board meeting on a proposed updated department policy on the use of police body cameras.

All Cass patrol officers have such a camera. Deputies have been using them for six or seven years, Burch told the county board Tuesday.

The updated, written policy and public hearing are designed to help the department comply with new state laws and to better inform the public about policies in place, he said.

All department members are expected to wear a body camera while assigned to patrol and court duty.

They are expected to record all enforcement stops and field interrogation situations, the proposed updated policy states. It is up to the officer's discretion on additional circumstances that might have evidentiary value.

Once started, the cameras should record continuously without interruption when feasible, the policy states. An officer, however, should not jeopardize his/her safety in order to activate a recorder or change recording media, but the recorder should be activated as soon as practicable.

Officers may not use the department issued cameras for personal use and are prohibited from making personal copies of recordings created while on duty. Officers will upload data from the recorders at the end of their shift or when near capacity to a county hard drive.

Recorded information is retained for at least 180 days in accordance with the sheriff's department general records retention policy.

Officers may review the body camera recordings when preparing written reports, but must still make their written reports detailed and cannot use the recordings to replace formal taped statements.

Department supervisors may review body camera recordings when conducting employee performance reviews, investigating alleged misconduct or evaluating meritorious conduct.

In general, body camera records fall under the sheriff's department general policies and state statutes governing all sheriff's department records, Burch said.

He said the body cameras have been well received here by both sheriff's personnel and the public.

Burch obtained board approval Tuesday to purchase seven squad vehicles, a Sentence to Serve program van and a jail transport van. All were budgeted for 2017.

The board approved an agreement to provide a $28,380 match for a grant of equal amount from federal Homeland Security and Emergency Management funds to operate the county emergency management division of the sheriff's department.

The money is channeled through Minnesota Department of Public Safety.

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