Orange County rejects PistolCam

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Times Herald-Record

October 03, 2008

GOSHEN — A controversial plan to equip the Orange County Sheriff's ESU team with gun-mounted video cameras died in the county Legislature on Thursday without a shot being fired.

The question before lawmakers was whether to accept a $20,000 grant from state Sen. William Larkin Jr., R-Cornwall-on-Hudson, to buy miniature cameras for the 20-member Emergency Services Unit to place on their rifles for training.

What would normally have been a routine grant acceptance had become a political football in recent months because Orange County Republican Chairman William DeProspo has been acting as spokesman for an upstate company that makes the cameras and has been using the sheriff's office in its marketing.

So when the vote finally arrived on Thursday, the legislator whose oversight committee supported the grant just a couple of weeks ago proposed tabling the proposal so that the money may be dedicated to other training purposes.

"There was much that was objectionable about it," said Stephen Brescia, R-Montgomery, chairman of the Public Safety and Emergency Services Committee.

The Legislature voted 21-0 to return the matter to committee. Brescia said afterward that Larkin has agreed to change the grant wording — for the second time — and that Sheriff Carl DuBois has mentioned counter-terrorism as one possible training use.

The camera proposal has followed a meandering course since DeProspo announced at a campaign news conference a year ago that City of Newburgh police and the Sheriff's Office would be the first departments to deploy PistolCam, the pistol-mounted versions of the camera.

Newburgh never pursued the idea. And it turned out the sheriff's unit wanted rifle models and only for training purposes, as DuBois later clarified. The cameras wouldn't have been deployed in armed confrontations. PistolCam's makers have been marketing the device as an unbiased source of evidence in police shootings.

Brescia said Thursday that complaints about DeProspo's involvement and his company's use of Orange County in its marketing had made the camera proposal untenable.

"The appearance didn't look good, and we were all concerned about that," he said. But he added: "It looks like we're not going to lose the grant, so everybody's happy."