MARQUETTE, Mich. (WZMQ) – The Marquette County Sheriff’s Department has gone through with the purchase of a new body camera system.
Over the past few months, the department has been in talks with Marquette County on utilizing FY26 capital project funds for these upgrades. The sheriff’s office received five bids over that time from a list of manufactures, ultimately selecting a roughly $68,000 deal with Motorola.
“We’ve been using body cameras since 2008, so we were one of the first agencies in the area to adopt the technology, and it’s worked well for us,” said Undersheriff, Lowell Larson. “This upgrade will help us keep that reliability.”
With the bid also came the option of manufacture-based cloud storage, an extra roughly $60,000. Larson says the department continues to utilize its local means of storage, which in turn, adds more work into the process while remaining subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) regulations.
“Some of the hurdles and maybe some of the reasons why not everyone has adopted the technology is because it’s a tremendous cost, along with all of the time and effort it takes to go through the footage,” he explained.
All 31 new units will be used by road patrol officers, with plans for the department’s existing cameras to pass along to county jail staff.
