Why Should Delaware Care?
New Castle County Police is the latest law enforcement department in Delaware to embrace new technologies that can create additional records of police interactions. But it also comes during a lean year for finances and officials are not saying exactly how they will fit into their budget.
The New Castle County Police Department signed a $50 million contract late last year to purchase new technology, including drones, tasers, and body cameras for officers.
Police officials say the investment improves their effectiveness and reduces safety risks for civilians and officers. But some county officials and residents have questioned how the local government will pay for the upgrades.
With a tough budget season weeks away, Spotlight Delaware asked New Castle County officials how they will pay for the ongoing contract into the future. They did not provide a direct answer.
Asked whether the county will raise taxes to pay for the contract, County spokeswoman Natalie Criscenzo said officials from County Executive Marcus Henry’s administration “are actively in the budget-building process.”
Henry will present a budget address to the County Council at the end of March.
Criscenzo also noted that Henry is in support of the police technology initiative.
“One of his top priorities in this job is public safety,” she said in a statement to Spotlight Delaware.
‘The settlement numbers’
In December, New Castle County police officials publicly presented to the County Council their initiative to purchase the drones, body cameras, and other technologies. They said then that the initiative aims to “bring officer safety and accountability” through the use of surveillance tools and cameras.
During the meeting, the county’s police chief — Col. Jamie Leonard — also noted that initial conversations about the new tech upgrades were sparked by the department’s lack of body cameras for every officer.
“Currently, we don’t have enough deployable body cameras to put them on the entire 411 of us,” Leonard said.
But during the meeting, Council members David Tackett, George Smiley, and Jea Street expressed concern over unanswered questions about where the money for the contract would come from.
“How many times in the last year have we borrowed out of reserve? To me, you can’t afford it, and that’s a major problem,” said Street, who was the sole council member to vote against authorizing the police department to make an initial $750,000 payment for the new technology.
Later during the presentation, Leonard indicated that the technology, including body cameras, could save the county money in legal settlements involving the police department’s deadly force cases.
He said that such technologies “exponentially reduces the risk.”
“I mean, you guys have seen the settlement numbers and what they are,” Leonard said.
Following the December meeting, Henry approved the initial payment of $750,000 for police to use the technology package during the current fiscal year.
The payment went to Arizona-based Axon Enterprise, the nation’s largest producer of Tasers and body cameras.
New contract replaces previous deal
While Tackett and Smiley joined Street in questioning how the county would pay for the technology, they were supportive of the initiative, as were the rest of the council members except Street.
“Technology is moving forward, with or without New Castle County,” Councilman Penrose Hollins said. “It’s going to move forward. We can be part of it, or we can watch it go by.”
To purchase the technology, New Castle County will pay Axon a total of $50 million over the next 10 years, according to contract documents.
But Criscenzo said some of those costs are already baked into the existing budget because the contract is an upgrade from an existing one the police had. As a result, she said the county will actually pay an average of about $1.78 million extra each year over the decade.
“This is different from what you’re looking at because it’s the delta between the new contract and what we’re paying now,” she said.
The police department was previously under a seven-year contract with Axon that was then replaced by the new 10-year contract in December.
New Castle police first started wearing body cameras in 2015 as part of a pilot program the department started for certain units.
That was six years before then-Gov. John Carney signed the law that mandated that all police officers wear body cameras during interactions with the public.
The new Axon contract will provide the department with 450 new tasers and 450 body cams for the department.
The department will also have access to what they call a Real Time Crime Center, an online hub to integrate police data into one system. This hub will allow officers to monitor feeds, such as drone footage, live body camera and dash camera video.
Another major piece of the contract includes the Drone First Responder (DFR) program, which would allow police to deploy drones from pre-established launch sites to scenes before officers.
The department will deploy 24 drones over the next six years and will start with 12 in the first year. Police have said the drones could reduce unnecessary ground responses by about 25%, citing an example of an abandoned car where a license plate number would need to be run.