Verona: Safety during interventions, the Local Police adopts bodycams

Greater safety and protection for agents on duty in the territory, in compliance with the user privacy, and irrefutable evidence for greater effectiveness of investigations.

After a short training period on how to use it, the The Local Police force will be able to count on 55 bodycams for HD recording of actions.

They will be reserved for operational departments, that is, to the patrols that carry out the most risky services such as first aid, anti-degradation, evening, night and urban safety.

It is cameras that are worn on the chest, last generation, used by numerous Local Police as in Padua, Treviso or Villafranca di Verona.

"We filled a gap - Explains Stefania Zivelonghi, Councillor for Security – with a project we have been working on since the first months of our administration, funded in 2023, and which went through a long, complex approval process that ended with the authorization of the Labor Inspectorate.

The bodycams will be operational soon and will be part of the equipment for the officers operating on the road. These are tools that allow the officer to activate and document, on his own initiative, dangerous situations for himself or for citizens."

The total investment for the 55 bodycam, licenses of the related management software, loading, storage of images plus the cost of the radio equipment for transmitting the cam data to the archive database was 190mila euros.

"This is a control system aimed at ensuring – explains the Budget Councillor, Michele Bertucco - the safety of agents and citizens, through images that can document acts and behaviors performed and the critical situations that can be generated daily during the territory control activity".

THEuse of bodycams, proposed by the municipal administration for protect the safety of local police officers who operate in the territory, often in dangerous situations, has been agreed with some trade union acronyms in the ways of use and safeguarding the privacy of those who will wear them.

A protocol was born from this, a Terms of Use, which was also submitted for approval by thelabor Inspectorate, pursuant to art. 4 of the Workers' Statute, which has endorsed.

The commander of the local police, Luigi Altamura expresses "a heartfelt thanks to all the trade union organizations for the contribution they wanted to give, each with their own formulas, to this strategic objective which is the protection of workers, subjected to risky activities, respecting privacy and the procedures indicated by the current legislation".

Le bodycams record high quality video, even in low light conditions, ensuring a clear and detailed recording, video and audio, of events.

How bodycams work

Officers wearing the camera can enable and disable recording manually by double-clicking.

The recorded video is stored, encrypted and sent via SIM to a cloud that meets the standards of the National Agency for Cyber ​​Security.

La cam has the Non-removable built-in memory then the images cannot be downloaded and viewed or tampered with either during use or later, once saved on the cloud: there is no possibility of improper use of the videos.

The agent who uses it, at the time warns, as per the Local Police Regulations, the person or persons who are proceeding with the registration, can also count on 30 seconds of recording prior to that moment.

Usually these are useful for demonstrating attempts at aggression, insults or threats, which is why we proceed to crystallise the moment of “tension” with images.

Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the recording in progress warning contributes significantly to dampening any potentially dangerous situations for the population and the officers themselves.

Once registered, the agent can request, giving adequate motivation to the officials in charge, authorization for use within 7 days.

The system then proceeds to delete the stored images, unless requested by the judicial authority.