Axon body camera (Photo courtesy Axon)
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – A major contribution from the Green Bay Packers is helping Green Bay Police acquire body cameras for their officers.
On Tuesday night, the Green Bay city council voted to accept $757,389 from the Packers to help buy the equipment. According to the manufacturer, Green Bay’s five-year, $2.7 million order includes: 190 Axon Body 3 cameras, 45 Axon Fleet 2 in-car cameras, and 150 TASER 7 devices as part of a five-year subscription to the Officer Safety Plan 7+.
The organization is also addressing what led to their decision to support the effort. Players and coaches have used their platform to talk about issues like racial inequality and social justice, but simply talking about it only goes so far.
“The roots of this probably go back a couple years starting with the the protest by Colin Kaepernick and some of the other issues around the league over the last couple years. A real inflection point for us as an organization was the Jacob Blake shooting,” said Packers President and CEO Mark Murphy. “Following that shooting, we all got together. I met for about an hour with all of our players and coaches everybody in the organization…It’s great to be able to protest and raise issues, but we would really like to move to progress…I think that was an example, that along with the sense that we’ve been talking about this for a long enough, we wanted to do something concrete.”
Murphy is excited about not only how the funding will benefit the police department, but the entire community.
Meanwhile, the city and police say they likely couldn’t have pulled it off without the assistance from 1265 Lombardi Avenue.
“The timing is absolutely right for us to move forward with body cameras here in the Green Bay Police Department, but it would not have been possible ,honestly, to move forward as rapidly as we’ve been able to do without the investment of the Green Bay Packers,” said Mayor Eric Genrich. “The $750,000+ monetary investment plus the in-kind expertise that they’re going to be offering to the police department can’t be overestimated.”
However, city taxpayers are still obligated to pick up the majority of the expense. Something Genrich says is up to him, the common council, the police chief, and other city officials to figure out in the coming years.
“We’re very, very grateful that we have this great working relationship with the Green Bay Packers it goes back generations of police officers,” said Police Chief Andrew Smith. “We’ve been looking at body cameras for about 6 years now. We did an initial survey about 6 years ago, looked at all the body cameras and all the systems that were available, and at that time we saw that Axon rose to the top of the market. But we just couldn’t afford it. We tried many different ways through the city to try and fund it, and we just could not afford to make that kind of investment.”
“They spent a lot of time not just in the last few months but evaluating this technology over the last several years and I’m just very confident in the decision that they’ve made and the decisions that are common council made on a unanimous vote, which was really encouraging,” Genrich added.
Smith says the team reached out following incidents that ignited protests over the summer, including the George Floyd and Jacob Blake situations.
“This is a real game changer for us in Green Bay, in policing. We’re going to have the latest technology that’s available, the best quality technology that’s available from Axon. It’s going to increase our transparency, it’s going to increase the accountability of our officers,” Smith said.
“This certainly isn’t the end all be all for community and police relations or enhancing public safety, but this is a really big step for us,” said Genrich. “People in this community are demanding accountability and transparency in just about all government operations, but especially with regard to our policing.”
That accountability, Smith says, will be not only to department supervisors – but to the community. Part of that accountability will come with officers reviewing and studying footage of situations either they recorded, or were recorded by other officers – much like professional athletes do to prepare for their next game.
“There’s a lot of scrutiny involved on both fronts and I feel like all that film study expertise that the Packers players and coaches are familiar with it’s gonna be really helpful to our command staff and our officers,” Genrich said.
“With the replay coaching, where our officers are going to get a chance to see themselves and how they responded to a situation and what they could have done differently, that’s going to be tremendous for us. I really think with all those factors, the Green Bay police department is really going to become a national leader in policing,” Smith said. “Like I told my kids, if Jaire Alexander can be a better cornerback through replay coaching, then every cop in Green Bay can be a better cop through replay coaching. I think it’s a fantastic idea and it’s really cutting edge. I’m really excited about it.”
Police Captain Ben Allen is in charge of much of the training efforts. He says going over footage from particular situations will be vital to improving how policing operates in the city.
“It gives the officer themselves the opportunity to submit video for review…That can be [that they] felt good about this citizen contact and they wanted us to see what this was like, they may have felt something could’ve been done better, or it just didn’t go right and they’re looking for pointers on how to fix those things,” Allen explained. “We’re able to get that video into our coaching system, [and] ship that off to the subject matter expert for them to review that and provide pointers to our officers…Video can also be used for training across the department. So when we get that outstanding interaction with the community, our officer is able to submit that and we can use that video department-wide as to the gold standard of how to work with and for the public.”
The technology would also allow them to access body cameras from other officers that were at the scene, as well as squad car cameras, and tie the videos together. Allen says that will provide a number of different angles and perspectives of exactly what happened during that incident.
At least some Green Bay police officers are expected to begin wearing body cameras by March of 2021.
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