By Alex Benzegala
Panhandle Post
The Alliance Police Department announced this week that they have upgraded their body cameras for officers. Alliance Police Chief Phillip Lukens explains that while the department already has body cams, they are now going to be able to automatically transcribe their body cam footage.
"What that means is, we're not going to provide reports that are a brief and abbreviated synopsis of an incident," Lukens said. "They're going to get the entire incident in the report."
Lukens says that while the new system will help provide information to officers, he explains that it will also help the department continue to build positive relationships within the community by doing what he calls "sentiment analysis."
"We want to make sure that we are leaving a good sentiment when we are talking to people," Lukens said. "Are we being rude? Are we being short? Are we upsetting people more than we are helping them? Those are things that we can be analyzing to make sure we are giving everyone a good service when we reach out to people."
Lukens says that the Department received what is called a Rural Crime Grant in December 2022, and the grant of $150,000 over two years covered the software and analysis of the upgrades.
According to Lukens officers started training with the new software on Tuesday and everything should be up and running by the end of the week or early next week.