The Tomball Police Department began outfitting its 42 full-time and three part-time officers with new L3 Mobile Vision body-worn cameras Aug. 17, Tomball police Chief Billy Tidwell said.

In mid-March, Tomball City Council approved the allocation of $20,000 to purchase the new cameras and an additional $20,000 to secure real-time video streaming for its 13 police vehicles, he said.

“We’ve had a couple of occasions where we’ve had officers say, ‘I’m really glad I had this [body-worn] camera on today because I encountered someone who wanted to be confrontational, and it turned out it won’t be an ‘I said, they said’ situation,’” Tidwell said.

According to policy, TPD officers are authorized to record all calls for service and enforcement stops that do not violate privacy laws. An officer is permitted to end a recording if there is no evidentiary value in a contact with the community and must vocalize the reason, Tidwell said.

Several bills, such as Senate Bill 158, House Bill 455 and HB 474, were proposed in the 84th legislative session regarding body-worn cameras. Of the three bills, Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 158 into law June 19, which establishes a grant program through the governor's office to purchase body-worn cameras and creates guidelines for their use. The bill went into effect Sept. 1.

“In our policy, supervisors will review [body-worn camera] footage weekly,” Tidwell said. “We will view it for quality assurance to make sure that our officers are responding the way they are supposed to by policy and our values. We are already doing that with the [dashboard] mobile video, so that is not going to be anything new to them.”

The biggest learning curve for TPD regarding the new technology is determining where to place the body cameras on each officer, he said.

"Everybody is looking at their videos to determine where for them is the best place to put the camera and how far to stand from someone to catch everything [on video]," Tidwell said. "What that indicates to me is our officers are intent that if we’ve got this technology, they want to make sure it works right, which I think is a good attitude on their part."

Community members are permitted to request body camera footage by filing an open records request through the Public Information Act, Tidwell said. License plates and other aspects that are deemed not public information will be redacted or blurred.

In addition to the body-worn cameras, TPD plans to go live with its real-time streaming system by the end of September through Harris County, he said.