FILE PHOTO — Max Vogt attends in January 2020 at the Lewis County Courthouse in Chehalis.
After the Centralia City Council and the police department discussed purchasing riot gear at a workshop in November 2020, several citizens voiced their concerns about racial bias within the police department and called for diversity training and possibly body cameras to hold Centralia police officers accountable.
At the Tuesday evening city council meeting, Angie Stritmatter, the city’s human resource and risk manager, provided the council with a report on the diversity and implicit basis training that police officers and city staff are required to complete. City staff has been required to complete anti-harassment training in the past, but this is the first year city employees are participating in diversity-focused training, Stritmatter said.
“The police department is currently finalizing and finishing up their implicit bias training for all of their law enforcement officers — sergeants and administration,” Stritmatter said.
The city is working with the workforce development division of the Washington State Department of Enterprise Services to provide mandatory, city-wide diversity training for full-time Centralia city staff. Stritmatter said that the training is currently being updated and it should be ready in March.
“We will have opportunities to learn and grow and understand, maybe, and recognize some bias that we have that we are not aware of,” Stritmatter said.
The two-hour, interactive diversity training will be led by an instructor virtually to groups of 24 people. Normally the training is held in person but the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed the training online.
Centralia Mayor Pro-tem Max Vogt also provided information about the potential cost of outfitting Centralia police officers with body cameras. Vogt met with the police department and Halo Technologies, a company that sells body cameras, to discuss the potential costs.
“It sounds like a great idea to have body cams, so I said ‘OK, how much is that going to cost?” Vogt said.
The estimated cost, Vogt said, would be between $130,000 and $200,000 per year. The estimated cost includes the cameras, unlimited iCloud storage and the hiring of one, possibly two, employees to go through the footage and redact faces, license plates and other personal information for legal or security purposes if body cam footage is requested.
“In our state, we have open government laws, and any person, for pretty much any reason, can contact us through the Freedom of Information Act and request to see a particular video that was on a police body cam,” Vogt said.
The requested video could be a minute long or footage from over the course of a few days, weeks or even years. That footage must be reviewed by a staff person.
“It’s an uncontrollable cost, and it’s unlimited,” Vogt said. “You never know how many people in the public are going to ask for footage and what they are going to ask for.”
Vogt said he plans to meet with other companies to get additional cost estimates and will provide more information in the future.
