Grand Junction Police Cruisers Lose Dash Cameras

Attorneys are questioning the move and the Police Chief says they are too costly to maintain. The Grand Junction Police Department may have a brand new building but last week decided to ditch the one impartial witness police and those they run into on the streets have - their dashboard cameras.

Thanks to The Daily Sentinel the public knows the cameras were effectively taken out of service last week when the  systems were disabled. The reason? According to Police Chief Camper it is because the systems, which were purchased with grant money, won't be backed up by a warranty any more and a new system would cost as much as 300-thousand-dollars with yearly maintenance of nearly twenty grand. The police chief told attorneys he was 'unconvinced' that the benefits justify the expense.

This leaves Mesa County Sheriff deputies as the only agency in the Grand Valley with the technology in their cars. Just last month the New Jersey ACLU released a smartphone app to let people discreetly record police stops. Which you can download here. As the ACLU New Jersey Executive Director Deborah Jacobs noted to Wired, “Too often incidents of serious misconduct go unreported because citizens don’t feel that they will be believed. "

That also leaves no way for Grand Junction Police Dash Cams to record cool videos like giant meteors falling from the sky.