Fargo Police share some capabilities of their body cameras

Courtesy of: Fargo Police Department
Courtesy of: Fargo Police Department

(Fargo, ND) -- The Fargo Police Department is sharing some of the functions of the body cameras they wear while on the job.

The department wanted the ability to record interactions with the public, while simultaneously not exceeding the perceptive abilities of the officers in the field. 

"We don't want the camera to see something, or portray something, that the officer would not have been physically able to see at the time," said Fargo Police Lieutenant Shane Aberle, in a presentation to the Fargo Police Advisory Board, "For example. Some cameras have the ability to show night vision... We wouldn't be able to see that, so we want the camera to be the closest representation to what the human eye sees."

The Department says the camera activates automatically on trigger events, like when an officer arms their taser or draws their sidearm, which will begin recording the event. The camera also has methods to stop manipulation of footage once recorded.

"Anytime you open up this camera - you do an audit of it, any of that stuff, everything is documented, "said Aberle," Which is great for us for chain of custody we have then for transparency, so we don't have allegations of 'we manipulated the video' or something like that. We can't delete videos without [the company] doing it for us or having multi-steps within our agency to be able to authorize that."

The camera also has other features for department knowledge, like GPS tracking, a buffering mode to capture past events, and a live-streaming feature other officers can view.