Greg Hilburn

The (Monroe, La.) News-Star

BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana will become the first state to equip every trooper with a body camera, the state's governor and police superintendent said Wednesday.

The decision to equip all 700 state police officers with body cameras comes after a summer of unrest in Louisiana's capital city, where the July 5 police killing of Alton Sterling, a black man who was reported to police to have had a gun on him, generated massive protests. A lone gunman assassinated three policemen and wounded three more less than two weeks later.

"This full statewide deployment is the first of its kind in the country," Gov. John Bel Edwards said during a news conference at the Governor's Mansion. "Nobody else has done what we're announcing today."

Edwards said he doesn't know when the federal Justice Department will complete its investigation of Sterling's death.

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Col. Mike Edmonson, Louisiana State Police superintendent, called the body camera initiative a home run for police and the public.

"This is exciting to me," he said. "This is about transparency and accountability, and it's great to be first."

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency began testing 500 body cameras for its troopers in July 2015, according to WHNT-TV, Huntsville, Ala. That's about the total number of troopers statewide, The Huntsville (Ala.) Times and (Jasper, Ala.) Daily Mountain Eagle reported; the agency has not said recently whether the initiative would go beyond the testing phase.

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New Jersey outfitted troopers at three of its state police stations with body cameras in early October as part of an program to have body cameras for every officer on the road, according to a release from the New Jersey State Police. A federal Justice Department grant indicates that New Jersey intends to use federal money to outfit 1,575 uniformed officers out of its 2,600 sworn members but has not added more officers yet, The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger reported.

Edmonson said the Louisiana initiative will cost $5.3 million over the life of a five-year contract with Scottsville, Ariz.-based Taser International (TASR), whose founder and chief executive Rick Smith also attended the news conference. The company's stock hit a day's high of $25.59 during the Wednesday news conference and was trading about 150% of its usual volume on NASDAQ; shares closed up 2.7% to $25.02.

"When people know they're being recorded, everybody's behavior improves," Smith said.

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Troopers in Edmonson's New Orleans unit will receive the cameras first in January with full deployment throughout the state by summer.

The police chief also said the body cameras will be valuable training tools.

"We can look at what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong," Edmonson said.

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