Mission RCMP’s body-worn camera project a costly endevour, city says

CAO says program will be ‘very expensive’ for city moving forward as admin work increases

Mission RCMP’s body-worn camera project a costly endevour, city says Published 7:30 pm Tuesday, July 14, 2026 Mission RCMP’s body-worn camera pilot has come with increased admin time for officers and potential costs for the city, according to the City of Mission CAO. At a special council meeting on Monday (July 13) with local MLAs and MPs, City of Mission CAO Barclay Pitkethly said many communities participating in the pilot will face a big challenge. Pitkethly said police officers are often doing admin work which would require municipal employees to lessen the load, despite a promise there would be no extra financial burdens on the city.

“We can’t afford to ramp up our municipal employee side to take care of the admin work that the RCMP officers desperately need, but the body-worn cameras are not going to be a cost savings for cities. They’re going to come at a very expensive cost as we ramp up the admin side of that to keep the RCMP officers on the road as opposed to in the back rooms, basically doing video editing,” Pitkethly said. Pitkethly said some funding was provided for the program, but it won’t be enough to cover the costs on a long-term basis.

Mayor Paul Horn added that the funding is not secured permanently. Horn said the federal government continues to fund 10 per cent of RCMP operations for municipalities like Mission, excluding municipal employees fully funded by the city. “Yet the federal government largely is doing the contract negotiations, and they’re responsible for programs that come down and standards that come down – like the size of a jail cell or the use of carbine rifles or body-worn cameras – that end up being paid for 90 per cent at the local taxpayer level,” Horn said, The city’s RCMP master plan aimed to increase the number of officers in Mission by 13 over five years.

Three have been added, in addition to two to serve the area east of Mission from provincial funding . Each added officer costs approximately $260,000 annually in the city budget, the mayor said. He said in past bargaining between the federal government and the National Police Federation, municipalities were told to set aside too little in reserves to cover the collective agreements.

Horn is concerned that will happen again. Mission-Matsqui-Abbotsford MP Brad Vis said he has raised the same points on behalf of other jurisdictions when the pilot commenced. “I will raise it again on behalf of Mission.

The extra burdens put on municipalities, I agree, are too cumbersome and are not fair to local ratepayers,” Vis said. The detachment became the first in the province to use body cameras in November 2024 with 44 deployed in the first week. Former Mission RCMP officer-in-charge Ted Lewko said at the time that Mission was an ideal spot to start the rollout.

Lewko provided an update on body-worn camera usage earlier this year. “Overall, the implementation of (body-worn cameras) has been a positive change. It helps to capture evidence and interactions in all sorts of situations, which helps bolster evidence for charges and court proceedings, but also helps to increase the public’s confidence that our officers are being professional and accountable during their investigations,” Lewko said.

According to Lewko, officers activate the audio and video recording when they arrive at a call and it continues until they leave. If the lights are green on the “little black box” at the front of the RCMP uniform, the recording is off. Meanwhile, if the lights are red, audio and video recording is active.

“The recording gets uploaded to the Digital Evidence Management System, which catalogs the recording and links it to body-worn camera footage from other officers on the same call; if the recording is needed as evidence in relation to a criminal charge, the audio from the recording is transcribed, and an in-depth vetting process is completed, to ensure that personal information (such as someone’s home address) is redacted, and to protect the identity of anyone not related to the investigation (such as someone walking past a police incident on a public street),” Lewko wrote.

Recordings are deleted after a set period if not required for an ongoing investigation or court case. Despite the positive change and “straightforward” use of the cameras, Lewko said there was a learning curve for officers and support staff dealing with some of the data processing. “As part of this, we worked closely with the BC Prosecution Service on how best to quickly provide evidence when someone was held in custody and the evidence was needed for a bail hearing within hours of an arrest.

We have since made significant progress and continue to work to find ways to make the procedures of processing and disclosing the BWC footage as streamlined and efficient as possible,” Lewko said.