Even with the Changes, Neillsville's Police Department is in Good Shape, Part 3
Friday, January 23rd, 2015 -- 11:52 AM
-The Neillsville Police Department has experienced a few changes the past several months, but the transition has been smooth and they continue to offer great services to the Neillsville Community.One of the first initiatives the Chief Scott Klueckmann began to work on when he took over was the body camera program.
Chief Klueckmann said, "I had the idea of the body cameras, of course that's not a new idea, a lot of departments are doing that with the events that happened in Ferguson, Missouri. Obviously you see body cameras exploding on the scene with different police departments. So, that's something that I wanted to do."
"The cost for such a program for this department, it runs around $4,000. And so, I budgeted $1,000 in the 2015 budget to start implementing the program, but, unfortunately, because of some of the budget cuts at the state level, the city wasn't able to give me that money. So, I ended up just putting it out on Facebook that we were interested in putting a body camera program together. I wasn't really asking for donations, but, all of a sudden, donations just started coming in. I had three donors who eventually donated the $4,000 that we needed and so I was able to implement that program."
"I have the cameras right now, they're sitting in a box just ready to be given to the officers. With our computer transition, our technology upgrade, we're upgrading our server and a couple of our computers right now, I'm not able to get the docking station to work. What the docking station does, is after an officer is done with their shift, they plug there camera into the docking station and it uploads all of there video to Tazer's website. So, it's cloud based storage and with our technology upgrade, I'm not able to get that to work, so I've just got it on hold until we switch over to our new computer system."
The department has several new initiatives they hope to implement in the New Year.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.