Noble, OK, September 20, 2019 – The Noble Police Department has recently purchased WOLFCOM Halo Body Cameras and Communications Officer Jared Cox says officers like the upgrade. Noble P.D. has been using WOLFCOM Vision Body Cameras since 2014 and has recently upgraded to Halo Body Cameras in early 2019. The department currently has 11 sworn officers wearing WOLFCOM body cameras.
According to Jared, they started using body cameras for accountability reasons. “Our Chief is just very big on accountability. He realized that having them [body cameras] on would cover our officers for when people try to say our officers said something or our officers did something. And instead of letting it all fall to a ‘he said, she said’ with the public trying to say stuff about our officers, he decided he wanted to go with the body camera systems,” said Jared. “Beforehand, we had digital voice recorders but that didn’t always work very well. And our officers were supposed to use those on their stops and he wanted to actually see what was going on, so he decided to go with body cameras,” he added.
When the department first implemented body cameras, according to officer Cox, “officers were a little bit leery, but once they saw how it helped them out, both being able to go back and actually see what they saw and show ‘we did not say this, we did not do this’. Most of the officers really like our body cameras. I’ve not had any officer complain about them, especially since we switched over to the Halos.”
WOLFCOM body cameras have helped Noble P.D. officers in many situations, but one of them stands out. “We had a shooting incident a couple of months back, in December, and body camera footage leading up to the shooting and some additional footage from the officer’s individual car camera definitely helped show everyone that our officer was trying to do his job as soft as he could and it escalated obscenely fast,” said Jared. You can watch the video of the incident at the end of this article.
Officer Cox says he likes the file search feature of the WOLFCOM Evidence Management System (WEMS). “Instead of trying to go on there in our old system and try to hunt up 3 different officers, find their folder on the hard drive, find that date, and find the videos from there. On the WEMS, you can go in and just search all videos from this time frame and it brings up all of them. For myself, for the Records Clerk, we have full access to the system so that we can see everyone’s videos at one shot and we can pull all the videos from one time at one shot instead of having to jump around and dig,” said the officer.
Jared also likes WOLFCOM’s Dock & Go technology. “Now they [officers] have the station where they set them [body cameras] at the end of the day and everything gets uploaded that day.”
The Halo Body Camera quickly became a favorite at Noble Police Department. According to officer Cox, “as far as the feature we like most on the Halo, besides the auto night time feature, is definitely also the one-press button that does everything. To turn it on, start the video, stop the video, then to turn it off.”
Office Cox is proud to say his department wears WOLFCOM body cameras. “I have spoken to some other people, they ask what we have and I’m proud to say we have the WOLFCOM [body cameras] and that it works very well for our officers,” said Jared. “We’ve been with you guys [WOLFCOM] for years and we’ll probably continue to use you guys for years to come. It’s a good system and I’ve not had any problems getting tech support or anything else,” he added.