By Dillon Mullan
Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE — All Baltimore City School Police officers will wear body cameras by next academic year.
At a school board meeting Tuesday night, school police officials said officers will record arrests, interviews, uses of force, and instances when officers stop cars, bicycles or people.
“They provide clear documentation of our officers’ interactions. They play a crucial role in evidence collection,” Nick Smith, the director of school police systems, said at the meeting.
The school’s police department has a budget for the 2024-25 school year of $10.6 million with 107 officers and staff, according to budget documents. Legislation in 2021 mandated that nearly every law enforcement officer in Maryland wear a body camera by July 1, 2025.
The equipment and cloud storage will cost the department around $1.1 million over five years, school police said Tuesday.
Patrol officers are piloting the body-camera program, and the board plans to adopt the policy for all officers in January before school-based officers start wearing the cameras in June.
Sabree Barnes, the director of school and student support, told the board Tuesday that the body camera footage will be reviewed every day, and that school police plan to assign three police officers to review footage.
Board member Ashiah Parker said reviewing all the footage will require additional hires.
“Who is going to review all of the video? I assume you will need new admin people to do that,” Parker said. “I have done oversight of the Baltimore Police Department and once it gets into full implementation, it’s going to be overbearing.”
During the public comment section of the meeting, two high school teachers, Robert Marianelli and Jocelyn Providence, said the many classroom doors in the district do not lock from the inside, which goes against national best practices for school shootings.
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