San Jose police volunteer for body cameras

Twelve officers of the San Jose Police Department have volunteered to wear body cameras as part of a planned pilot program with three different models of cameras, including one that can be affixed to glasses, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

The purchasing division of San Jose’s Finance Department has already approved the vendor contracts for digital video cameras for the pending pilot program, police spokeswoman Sgt. Heather Randol said.

Meanwhile, city officials are conferring with the San Jose Police Officers’ Association over the issue of body-worn cameras for the pilot program, Randol said.

Once the program is given the go-ahead, the Police Department with its 12 volunteers will pilot three different cordless, wearable video cameras, including a model made by the company Vievu and two by Taser International, the Axon Body and Axon Flex, according to Randol.

Vievu offers the Vievue2 model, a square-shaped wearable camera that sends and stores streaming videos in real time directly to iPhone or Android smartphones for texting or uploading to email and social media sites, according the firm’s website.

The company’s rectangular LE3 model, used by 4,000 law enforcement agencies, has HD resolution with 16 gigabytes of internal memory for 12 hours of videos and software that proves the videos have not been altered and prevents outsiders from accessing them if the camera is stolen, according to the website.

Taser International’s rectangular Axon Body camera clips to an officer’s shirt or utility belt, has a 130-degree wide lens and uploads videos onto its Evidence.com website and storage cloud or to other data storage systems, the company reported on its website.

Its Axon Flex model is a 3.2-inch long, .70-inch thick camera that can clip to glasses, helmets, ball caps, dashboards and elsewhere, with a separate 3-inch long controller that can be worn in a holster, according to the company.

The Police Department’s wearable camera pilot program will help it make decisions on the type of camera that it can manage among its personnel and infrastructure, Randol said.

The program will also give the department an idea on how much the wearable cameras cost, she said. According to two companies’ websites, the Vievu2 and LE3 sell for $349.95 and $899.95 each, respectively, while the Axon Body goes for $399 and the Flex model $599.