BERKSHIRE COUNTY, Mass. - Later this year, the police departments of Great Barrington and Sheffield will become the first municipal police departments to use body cameras in Berkshire County.

Great Barrington police will receive 24 body cameras and Sheffield police will get 16, enough for one for every officer in each department. 

Great Barrington Police Chief Paul Storti said his officers asked for the cameras.

“We’ve really been working hard on transparency and getting a lot of information out there to the public to show them what we’re doing, our trainings, our policies, all that stuff,” said Storti. “So it’s another tool to show the transparency and show the community what we’re doing.”

A state grant will fund the cameras. The towns pay for necessary software and data storage upgrades.

In Sheffield, the cameras will be an expansion of the department’s use of dashboard cameras in their cruisers. Chief Eric Munson said they’ve been helpful for both the police and the community.

“In a lot of cases it’s exonerated people,” said Munson of the dashboard cameras. “It’s exonerated officers for false complaints on a few occasions, and it’s also helped with convictions of some individuals.”

Both departments plan to use the cameras by late summer or early fall. Chief Munson hopes they can be a model for other towns in the area to follow.

“I do believe that it’s going to implement well within both communities,” said Munson. “And hopefully other departments will see that it’s working here and they’ll move forward with the same thing.”

Both chiefs said their departments will have some kind of community education campaign in their respective towns in the next few months to let the public know how the cameras will be used and what the departments’ policies for them will be.