Darien Police Station

Body Cameras for Darien Police May Be in Next Year’s Town Budget

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Police Chief Duane Lovello says the department again is looking into buying body cameras for all police officers, a proposal that was almost made in last year’s budget deliberations. “We are exploring potential implementation of body cameras, as is every other department in the state that doesn’t have them,” Lovello told a recent meeting of the Darien Police Commission. The cost of getting body cameras is not so much in the devices themselves — they cost roughly $300 or $400 apiece — but in storing and retrieving the video records, which could run up to $75,000 or $80,000 a year, he said. The state attorney general wants any body-camera videos stored up to four years, because civil lawsuits can have a filing deadline, in some circumstances, that long after an incident (for the most part, he said, the deadline is three years). “We did have it [a body-camera program proposal] all fired up for last year’s budget [deliberations] and pulled it out at the last minute,” Lovello said.