SALT LAKE CITY-Thursday, the Salt Lake City Council confirmed they will be placing tighter controls on a fraction of the city’s police budget.
They will now fund body cameras for every officer on the force.
Council Chairman Chris Wharton said they would not consider calls for a $30 million slash to occur to the city’s police force.
Wharton explained that such drastic measures would result in the jeopardizing of “essential police services.”
Furthermore, he continued, this proposal fails to take “community-minded” programs into account.
However, the city council did propose budget maneuvers that “move us forward in addressing the issues that have been raised” he said.
In an informal vote ahead of Tuesday’s budget meeting which the city council unanimously approved, an additional $687,000 will be used to provide all sworn police officers with body cameras, data and Tasers.
Furthermore, this investment will consist of an additional $93,000 for technology fitted to police cruisers to automatically turn these body cameras on.
This budget adjustment would entail shuffling funds out of the police department budget and into “nondepartmental” spending.
This would “increase transparency and prioritization” of those specific line items, per the city’s finance staff.
This would also include an additional $287,000 to ensure all police officers receive deescalation training annually.
Of those funds, $80,000 would be spent to add three social workers.
Beyond this, the city council signaled support to put about $2.8 million of the police department’s budget into a holding account for future discussion.
