A S.C. bill that requires every officer in the state to have access to a body camera might soon become law, but ensuring the state can provide funding for the cameras will take a number of years, according to legislators.
Senate Bill 0047, now known as the Walter Scott Bill, passed the House on Wednesday and is now in conference committee - a group that consists of House and Senate members.
The bill will then go back to the Senate for further deliberation.
In drafting the legislation, the Senate is proposing $3.4 million to buy 2,000 cameras and servers to store the camera's data. Overall, buying cameras for about 12,000 law enforcement officers in the state would cost an estimated $30 million.
S.C. Sen. Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, said the $3.4 million is included in the general budget proposal, which is being hashed out in the House.
Moving forward, Massey said, it's unclear where the rest of the funding will come from, but pulling directly from the general fund is improbable.
"That's a good bit of money to try to come up with, so I think that's something we'll have to deal with over a period of years," Massey said. "But if we mandate them, then we should fund them."
Movement of the bill heightened after the April 4 fatal shooting of Scott by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager.
Eyewitness to the shooting, Feidin Santana caught the incident on video with his cellphone. Slager has since been fired and charged with murder.
The release of the Scott video helped push legislation through House and Senate subcommittees - the speed of which the bill went through had not been accomplished before the video's release.
If passed, the Walter Scott bill would include language to reimburse individual law enforcement agencies that purchase body cameras - an option that legislators believe would be the best practice of coming up with the funding.
Lt. Jake Mahoney, of Aiken Department of Public Safety, said the department has an estimate of close to $70,000 a year to maintain the cameras and the data that will need to be stored.
"Money that would come from the state government would be the best option, but any source of funding that will aid us in purchasing cameras would be welcome, whether fully funded or partially funded," Mahoney said.
Providing funding for body cameras is an issue that also was addressed by S.C. Rep. Bill Taylor, R-Aiken.
Taylor said the legislature often finds itself giving unfunded mandates to local government bodies.
"Those are decisions that need to be made by local law enforcement agencies," Taylor said. "(The bill) calls for the law enforcement training consoles to work through how to use them and all kinds of privacy issues, so we shouldn't mandate them if we're not going to provide the money."
Derrek Asberry is the SRS beat reporter for the Aiken Standard and has been with the paper since June 2013.