Looking back on police body cameras

CLINTONVILLE – Since August of 2025, Clintonville Police Department officers have been using body cameras, which was a goal of Clintonville Chief of Police Craig Freitag since he was hired as chief in 2019.
Freitag said it was his goal to bring body cameras to the department because they help “solve all sorts of issues,” adding that the majority of the officers with the police department wanted body cameras.
Body cameras help with the police department’s transparency with the public by showing how officers treat citizens and whether they are doing their jobs correctly, Freitag said.
Body cameras also help capture evidence.
“Obviously, we do a report and sometimes we can’t put a report on everything we’ve seen or we can’t be descriptive. That camera there is going to capture everything,” Freitag said.
He added that body cameras also help to quickly clear up concerns regarding officers or complaints about officers.
Because of that, Freitag said he made it a goal to have the department provide each officer with a body camera. It took until August of 2025 to make that happen.
“We attempted four different times for grants (to purchase body cameras) since 2019,” Freitag said.
He added, “I made it a priority that our officers need these, hoping to get some funding. After the fourth time (we failed to receive a grant to purchase the body cameras) we knew we had money in the capital budget years down the road for that. It was our hope that we could have gotten them sooner. So, 2025 came and we were able to get them onboard here and implement it.”
The camera system that was purchased with $55,000 from capital funds allow the body cameras and squad car cameras to work together, Freitag said.
The department purchased enough body cameras for each officer with the department. Officers are required to wear a body camera.
The cameras are activated when an officer in a squad car turns on the siren lights because they are synced together, Freitag said.
“That’s why it was important to have the same system,” Freitag said.
The body cameras can also be activated by the officer pressing the record button on the cameras when they are on a service call that doesn’t require the sirens of a squad car to be used.
“When they get on the scene, they press the button to activate the body camera. It captures 45 seconds prior to them pushing the button,” Freitag said.
Freitag said footage from the body cameras is uploaded to cloud storage. The camera system the department uses also has software that allows the department to blur allowable parts of the footage for open records requests.
Since the body cameras were introduced to the Clintonville Police Department, Freitag said they have benefited the department and the officers “speak highly of them.”
“I know (Waupaca County) District Attorney Cat Turner was very excited, because I believe we were the last department within Waupaca County without squad cameras,” Freitag said. “Speaking with her, she was very excited, and it helps them with prosecution.”