If you are stopped by a police officer in Cotati, the event will likely be captured on a video camera worn on the officer's shirt.
The city's 10 police officers now carry the pager-sized cameras, joining law enforcement agencies around the world that are rapidly adopting the devices to reduce complaints and record valuable information.
Santa Rosa police officers are testing models, with about 15 cameras now on the street. The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office expects to start a pilot program next year with cameras on 11 patrol deputies and two jail officers.
Whether such a camera would have been helpful in the aftermath of the recent fatal shooting of a 13-year-old Santa Rosa boy by a sheriff's deputy is unclear.
"It's hard to speculate what impact it would have had on us," said Assistant Sheriff Lorenzo Due?s.
Currently, deputies do not wear video cameras or have them on patrol cars. But the presence of such a camera might have provided answers to at least some questions swirling in the community over the Oct. 22 death of Andy Lopez, which has sparked two weeks of protests and spawned a federal civil rights lawsuit by the teen's family.
"I don't know if any type of camera, even with audio, could possibly reflect what an officer was feeling when such an incident occurs, but it surely would establish if his actions were objectively reasonable under the circumstances to show sustained fear of death and/or great bodily injury to himself or others," county Public Defender Kathleen Pozzi said in a statement.
Lopez was walking through a southwest Santa Rosa neighborhood carrying an airsoft BB gun resembling an AK-47 assault rifle when he was shot seven times. Deputy Erick Gelhaus told police investigators he ordered Lopez to drop the gun, then fired when the teen turned toward the deputy and his partner, raising the barrel of the BB gun.
Gelhaus said he mistook the airsoft gun for a real assault weapon and feared for the safety of himself, his partner and the neighborhood. Law enforcement protocol allows for officers to shoot when they perceive a threat to their lives. The shooting remains under investigation by Santa Rosa police and the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office.
Pozzi and ACLU officials say the idea of police departments acquiring chest-worn cameras sounds promising, depending on how the video recordings are used.
"The basic idea officers will be wearing some kind of personal camcorder that will record what's going on between them and the public, that seems to be positive," said Marty McReynolds, chairman of the local ACLU chapter.
"The question is, how to protect both the public's and the officers' privacy," McReynolds said. "The details will be important."
While law enforcement officers see the videos as a boon for crime fighting and prosecutions, Pozzi expected such evidence could end up showing prosecutors don't have the evidence they claim.
"Certainly it's accountability," she said. "Many times I think ultimately it will be favorable to the defense as opposed to being helpful to the prosecution."
However this latest trend plays out in courtrooms, it's a popular one.
Law enforcement agencies from Staffordshire, England, where about 500 officers are getting body cameras, to San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles are either fitting staff with the cameras or conducting pilot programs.
Cotati is the first agency in Sonoma County to equip its entire force, 10 officers. Just over half of Sebastopol's 12 officers also have been using them.
Cotati Police Chief Michael Parish said the new technology is a logical step for law enforcement, offering far more detail than fixed dashboard cameras that have been in his city's patrol cars since 1999.
"This goes with the officer wherever they go," said Parish. "When they're doing an enforcement, they activate their camera. When they're done, they turn it off."
Money seized from drug cases paid for the new equipment, which cost $300 per camera and $1,000 for a docking station, Parish said. Officers also each are getting iPhones to work with the cameras.
Santa Rosa police and sheriff's officials are working out funding the substantial cost of buying cameras for several dozen officers and deputies.
The sheriff's pilot program has a $21,000 start-up cost, covered mostly by grant money, said sheriff's Capt. Rob Giordano.
Other issues include which model would hold up best in bad weather or physical fights and how best to store the sizeable amount of data they will collect.
Storage options include Cotati's path — uploading the daily data to a cloud, freeing up the department's computer data storage space, Parish said.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: