DILLINGHAM, AK- The Dillingham Alaska Police Department recently ordered a total of 8 WOLFCOM Vision Police Body Cameras.
“It is good to hear that so many police officers appreciate the WOLFCOM Vision Body Camera. We designed the Vision to be small and durable because police equipment needs to be reliable. The Dillingham Police Department learned this through their experience with some of the low-quality body cameras on the market. We designed our VISION to be reliable, durable and easy to use. We are happy that this department chose to order and use the WOLFCOM VISION,” said WOLFCOM Founder Peter Austin Onruang.
Chief Dan Pasquariello talked about his department’s decision to start up a body camera program. “We decided to get body cameras for the same reason most departments decide to get them… to visually document police activity and interactions with the public. We wanted to reduce complaints, document evidence and record video of crime scenes,” said Pasquariello.
Dillingham PD is an 8 police officer department. Before ordering the WOLFCOM VISION, the department first ordered a lower-priced body camera. “We had first gotten the smaller cheap body cameras. We’re a smaller department so we ordered the $80 body cameras and we found that they didn’t work for long. they were hard to operate after a while and ended up breaking on us… Our officers couldn’t figure out if they were on or not…. my officers always had an excuse for why they didn’t have video and, usually, it was when there was a complaint and we needed the video. So we decided to get better ones,” said Pasquariello.
The department ordered 4 cameras in Fall of 2015 and ordered an additional 4 in January of 2016. “Some of our officers researched better body cameras and we chose the WOLFCOM VISION. What we liked about them was the ease of use. They were a little bigger and more substantive than the cheap ones we were using, so durability was also a factor,” said Pasquariello. “Our officers like them, they’re holding up well. We like them better than the old ones. We like the VISION’s ease of operation, they’re easy to upload the video too. We like the image quality of the video,” said Pasquariello.
“We wear outer shell carrier vests on our uniforms. Most of our guys wear them in the middle of the chest on those carriers.” Chief Pasquariello says while the technology has changed over the years, the need to document police interaction with the community has always been there. “We’ve been doing this since the days of the audio cassette recorders, we always used to use those and video is just the next set up,” said Pasquariello.