By Howard Packowitz

Bloomington’s police chief, who took over earlier this year, said he’s guiding the department through a monumental change in technology with the addition of body-worn cameras for all police officers.

The department had been testing body cams long before the city council last month voted to spend about $750,000 over five years to buy 100 cameras and other equipment.

Chief Clay Wheeler and members of his staff showed off the hardware at a public meeting Tuesday night.

Officers are required to activate their body cams for each law enforcement encounter, providing potential evidence in every case they’re handling. Wheeler said it also requires officers to do a few minutes extra work.

“Every call that they go to where they take a report, they’re going to have a piece of evidence to take care of. They’re going to have that audio-video recording of the interactions on that call at the very least,” said Wheeler.

“So there’s that information that the officers are going to have to catalog and deal with,” the chief added.

The department has accumulated more than 35,000 digital files during the past five months, according to Assistant Chief Ken Bays. He said body cams have proved their worth in fighting crime.

“It’s outstanding,” said Bays.

“When we were doing our tests, we actually had an individual present an ounce of meth on a traffic stop that no one would have believed it had it not been captured on the video camera,” the assistant chief said.

In most cases, police have to notify people that body cams are being used, but BPD’s new public information officer, John Fermon, said the public generally expects officers are recording their public encounters.

Howard Packowitz can be reached at [email protected]