It’s not just about better DNA and fingerprinting equipment or electronic ticket writing, either.

“One of the game changers is the update to our body camera system,” said Capt. Justin Sundheim with the police department. “Whenever an officer’s body camera is recording, which is anytime they are on a call, the recording can be viewed at the police station in real time.”

During an emergency call, instead of communicating by radio, a supervisor can tap into the video to assess the officer’s safety or specifics of a situation that can be relayed to other responding officers by dispatchers, who also can access that live video. Additionally, the officer on the call can communicate with others watching the video, all through a secure network, Sundheim said. The same remote access is available through fleet cameras located on patrol vehicles and the department’s drones.

“It gets us very quickly, virtually on scene,” Sundheim said. GPS, or global positioning, also is built into most technology, making it easy to locate where officers are during critical incidents, he said.

Sundheim estimated the department has used its drones fewer than five times in about a year.

“We’re very limited on when we can use them, and that’s per state law,” Sundheim said. Typically, an emergency situation or warrant is required for any invasive law enforcement action.

In one instance, the Minot department used a drone to ensure safety in unknown terrain for a K-9 and handler during a search. The drone was used after Minot North High School opened to get a more comprehensive view of traffic flow and look for opportunities to reduce congestion.

Sundheim said because of the extensive training required, the department has only two licensed drone pilots.

While drones are starting to become more widely used by law enforcement, camera systems are well established and continue to improve and, in some cases, become more affordable.

The police department recently approached the Minot City Council with a proposal for licence plate readers (LPR) to be installed in select locations around the city.

According to the International Association of Police Chiefs, 85% of all crime has a vehicle associated with it, Sundheim said. LPR technology scans vehicle license plates and sends alerts when one matches a plate listed in a database as wanted by law enforcement. The council tabled the proposal after concerns were raised about individual privacy.

“License plates are issued to vehicles for the purpose of identifying that vehicle when it’s in the public,” Sundheim said. “What LPR does is it helps us sift through those vehicles in regards to high value. Is that vehicle wanted, or not?”

As LPR devices have dropped dramatically in price, the next generation of in-car cameras has the LPR technology built in, he said.

“We’re not using that because we want to make sure that we’re having a very transparent discussion about what those two systems do,” Sundheim said of the mobile and stationary readers. “Eventually we hope all of our patrol cars would have one in it, as long as we are all in agreement in regards to its use.”

The Ward County Sheriff’s Department has LPR equipment on one of its patrol vehicles. The department installed the technology on only one vehicle not only because of the expense at the time but because it takes a robust computer to continuously run in simultaneous operation with other technology carried in vehicles. It also requires special training and experience on the part of the officer using that vehicle, Sheriff Robert Roed said.

Cpl. Kayla Powers, now an investigator with the sheriff’s department, was the first deputy to be assigned to the vehicle.

“We’ve recovered stolen vehicles using this license plate reader,” she said. “Without the cameras alerting the driver to that stolen vehicle driving past them, we might have otherwise missed it.”

Even with the LPR technology, a deputy must verify the information before acting on it. A database might not be up to date or the reader might misinterpret a plate depending on viewing conditions.

“The license plate reader isn’t necessarily tracking people’s movements. It’s looking for license plates that are already entered in the system as stolen or wanted for some reason,” Roed said.

Like police vehicles, every sheriff’s patrol vehicle is outfitted with an Axon camera system and each deputy wears an Axon body camera linked to the car camera. The in-car cameras constantly run but record into a closed loop that saves only a certain amount of footage, allowing viewing back in time to a certain point. As is typical with such systems, the cameras activate with the vehicle’s lights or if the deputy exceeds a certain speed.

Each deputy has an assigned cell phone, which also serves as a camera and voice recorder to capture information during incident calls, with data going directly into the Axon system and potentially on to the State’s Attorney’s Office with other case information. Even home surveillance systems can download evidence into the Axon system with a link provided by the sheriff’s department.

Home systems increasingly can assist law enforcement but so can personal cell phones. Access to cell phone tower data can enable law enforcement to pinpoint a person’s location in an emergency. Roed said phone companies do not release information unless it is a documented emergency in which someone is in danger. For instance, a hang-up 911 call from a cell phone or a search for a missing, vulnerable person might warrant tracing a location.

Cell phones are commonly connected to crimes as well.

“In a lot of ways, that has become a very vital piece of evidence,” Sundheim said. “Usually, that’s the first thing we want to look at is the cell phone.”

Accessing phone data requires warrants, and often several warrants, as each piece of information sought needs to be identified.

“Each layer, the courts have found there’s a level of privacy, and the expectation of privacy can become very complicated, very time consuming,” Sundheim said.

The department has a civilian digital forensic technology specialist who is familiar with the processes and can help ensure search warrants are obtained quickly and efficiently, he said. An evidence tech at the police department manages items collected from the department’s use of technology, amounting to about 70,000 pieces of digital evidence a year.

Keeping up with constantly changing technology requires regular training.

“In some ways advances in technology does make the job more difficult, but these tools, as far as fighting that crime, have helped us keep up with it,” Roed said. Younger people coming into law enforcement expect technology and support the use of more, he said.

Sundheim said technology enables officers to use time more efficiently. By speeding the process of combing through data to extract the pieces that are valuable, technology aids financially constrained departments that are being asked to do more with less, he said.

“It’s a matter of doing it the right way, and doing it responsibly, and doing it in a cost efficient way,” he said.

The downside of technology is the cost, Chief Deputy Larry Hubbard with the sheriff’s office said. With technology comes maintenance agreements, software licenses, replacement costs and technology staff support. The current five-year contract for in-car cameras and body cameras cost Ward County in excess of $400,000, he said.

The more that technology is used in law enforcement, too, the more the judges and jurors expect to see.

“The courts now – if it’s not recorded and on video, they want more,” Roed said.

“It’s really become the expectation from the community,” Sundheim said. “What we found, I think, throughout the years, is if that doesn’t happen, those cases become harder.”

At the same time, technology is raising privacy concerns, although law officials say there are efforts to balance privacy against solving crimes. Nor is it realistic to assume law officers are watching citizens who aren’t wanted for a reason, Roed said.

“There are too many people and not enough of us to track somebody’s whereabouts, and it’s almost impossible to do because there are so many safeguards in place,” Roed said.

Sgt. Nick Wooster, a sheriff’s department investigator, said agencies must keep up with case law regarding appropriate use of technologies. For instance, courts have greatly restricted geo-fencing, or identifying all the cell phones in an area at a given time, to the point that using that technology is not possible in many cases.

Hacking and abuse of technology also is difficult because of the safeguards, according to both the sheriff’s and police departments. The LPR equipment used by the sheriff’s office is highly secure, according to investigators Powers and Wooster.

“It has a lot of security put in place even for us to log into the console. It’s a process. It wouldn’t be easily hackable,” Powers said.

“The only thing it’s doing is checking plates against a database of existing stolen vehicles. And it’s not saved if it doesn’t hit on one of those databases,” Wooster added.

With the hi-tech features and guardrails, the skill level required to inappropriately access information is higher, and redundancies exist to stop those activities, the agencies report. They note a crime victim or family of a missing person also might feel differently about limiting law enforcement’s access to technology.

When searching for a missing person, law enforcement wants to be able to tell family members that every tool will be used to find them, Sundheim said.

“We have the ability to potentially do this,” he said. “I don’t want to look at community members in their time of need and say, ‘We don’t have that ability.'”