Scott Tod is optimistic he will see the North Bay Police Service roll out its police body-worn camera project.
Unfortunately, Tod admits he wishes it happened under his watch.
"I'll be glad to see it rolled out. I have to admit it's a large disappointment that we haven't rolled it out in the last three years that we've been working on it," said Tod, who officially retired as North Bay's chief of police on Friday.
"But it's not because of the lack of effort on anyone here. It's because of what I think are the external factors around the collection of digital evidence."
Tod believes getting that type of digital evidence will be a big challenge.
"The pressure that it puts on the Crown Prosecution services in Ontario, to have a package ready within a very short time frame of all the evidence that's collected by police services to be used in the prosecution, it required us to retool how we thought digital evidence should be managed internally, but also to conform to a provincial standard on digital evidence management and seek the best possible solutions that we had.
"We are looking for that true one solution that will give us the ability to collect the evidence as quickly as possible and be provided to the Crown Prosecution Service as quickly as possible."
See related: North Bay Police body-worn camera project slowly moving forward
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Tod says during the three-year process to get the police body-worn cameras going, they have had to re-engineer how to do digital evidence management.
"We are trying to work with all of the other police services in the ministry in Ontario. It has been a change and delay along this long and difficult process," he admitted.
"But it's not as a result of no one doing the work. In fact, it's caused us to do a lot more work than what we originally thought we were going to get into."
Tod insists that all the police services that are using body-worn video right now are all challenged.
"We will see it in the short future. There are challenges to being able to use their body-worn video evidence in court and to have it used in all the cases in which it can be done.
"We will all be challenged by this but we want to make sure that we provide to our employees the best system possible so they don't feel the stress that other police officers are going through right now, and the financial cost too, so I can't wait to see it.
"I'm excited to see it being done in the community. It's something I promised that I didn't deliver on but it's something that I don't think it's a fault of anyone or any one specific person or any system that we have."
