Manitowoc County Sheriff Dan Hartwig
The Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office is looking to upgrade its technology.
Sheriff Dan Hartwig explained on WOMT’s Be My Guest program that the department is working on a rate proposal or RFP with the Manitowoc County Board of Supervisors to acquire body cameras, squad cameras, update interview rooms, purchase Tasers, and provide channeling services.
The county sheriff says that right now, all video camera data is stored on the county’s servers, which consume a significant amount of space on the computers.
“When you look at the county with the 25-26 departments, we’re taking up a good chunk of our IT services at the county,” he explained. “One of the things we’re looking at is trying to alleviate some of the stress on our IT by going to a cloud-sourced storage system.”
With the new technology comes new software as well.
Hartwig says he’s amazed at how far the software has come, especially with the use of body cameras for deputies.
“It’s where an officer can hit an alert button on the body camera, and any other users that are currently working it will alert them to livestream,” he noted. “If the officer is having a problem or something that they want to get another set of eyes on, what’s going on, they can hit that button, and the other users can remote into that officer’s body camera.”
The sheriff’s office is also considering acquiring a device that will automatically activate a body camera if a deputy draws a Taser.
The Manitowoc County Finance Committee met last night (June 9th) to discuss the status of acquiring body cameras for the sheriff’s office. Hartwig says a full proposal could be ready by 2026.
