The Ocean Pines Association Police Department will bolster community safety efforts through a series of state grants, including $35,000 for body cameras.
An Ocean Pines police vehicle is pictured.
Submitted photo
By Tara Fischer, Staff Writer
The Ocean Pines Association Police Department will bolster community safety efforts through a series of grants awarded by the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention and the Maryland Highway Safety Office, including $35,000 for body cameras.
In total, the community’s police department received approximately $61,000 in funding from the state, and OPPD Chief Tim Robinson said the funds will enhance public safety, increase officer visibility at neighborhood events and improve transparency within the department.
The financial aid awarded by the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention includes a $3,891 body armor grant. Robinson said that the state provides half the money required for the bulletproof vests while the federal government incurs the remaining cost, which totaled $2,485. The chief added that the equipment is expensive, roughly $1,500 per officer, and must be updated every five years.
The upgrades are spaced out so as not to overwhelm the department.
“If I had to outfit everyone here at one time if we are fully staffed, that is $24,000 … but we stagger them,” Robinson said. “They are bought as new officers are hired, they are fitted for each officer, or when it needs to be replaced, around five years later.”
OPA’s safety department received $35,000 from the Crime Control and Prevention Office’s Police Accountability, Community and Transparency (PACT) Grant. Most of the funds will be used to purchase new body cameras.
Robinson said the department is halfway through a five-year contract with Axon Enterprises, an Arizona-based company that provides Ocean Pines with its body cameras. The initial agreement was signed in 2022, the technology was employed in August of 2023, and the deal was set to expire in 2026.
However, thanks to the recently awarded PACT grant, Axon is allowing Ocean Pines to renegotiate the contract early, providing the department with new and improved body cameras. The updated arrangement will extend for five years.
The $35,000 from the state will fund one year of the cameras and all that comes with them, like the software systems and licenses for each device. The OPPD will pursue additional grants to pay for the remaining four years of the agreement.
“Body cameras are a great thing,” Robinson said. “Any police officer in 2024 would be crazy to go out on the street without a body camera… it is an impartial arbitrator of what happened. It tells you, without any bias, from a camera lens, what happened. Many times, when I see people are emotional and upset about what happened in an interaction with a law enforcement officer, I go back and look at the body camera, and it shows me exactly what happened. Most of the time, it protects the officers and obtains valuable evidence, anything from people committing crimes in front of them to admissions and statements…If we do see something that is wrong on the part of the officer, then we obviously deal with that.”
While many law enforcement groups have implemented body cameras, the State of Maryland will not mandate them until next summer.
Also, through the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention, the Ocean Pines law force received $4,456 from the Community Grant Program to fund overtime expenses within the department to allow for a visible presence at large community gatherings, like the Fourth of July and National Night Out.
The money will help to pay for the officers’ additional hours worked at those events. Robinson said increasing police presence at celebrations is necessary to keep the neighborhood safe and everything running smoothly.
“For one event, like the Fourth of July, you could rack up $1,000 in overtime that day combined,” the chief noted. “The Fourth of July was an all-hands-on-deck for the police department. Everyone was working at some point that evening because of the number of people we had here and the responsibilities we had to make it a safe event, like getting the traffic to flow and get in and out.”
OPPD also received $15,125 from the crime control and prevention office for a police recruitment and retention grant. The funds will help the department attract and keep qualified officers.
From the Maryland Highway Safety Office, Ocean Pines was awarded a $900 Speed Enforcement Grant to support speed limit initiatives, a $1,035 Impaired Driving Grant to aid efforts in reducing DUIs, and a $990 Occupant Protection Grant to carry out seat belt and child safety seat enforcement.
Robinson said the department applied for these grants in the spring. The applications go through committee reviews, and decision-makers determine recipients based on the quality of the request and the amount of money they have to allocate.
The application process, while extensive, was rewarding, Robinson said.
“I enjoy [writing grants] because it is something neat to do,” he said. “I feel like I really accomplished something when I write a grant and I can bring in additional funding to my jurisdiction.”
In the PACT grant application, for instance, the chief was required to include a problem statement and needs justification, program goals and objectives, a spending plan, a timeline, and a slew of other documentation to be eligible for consideration.
The grants will allow the Ocean Pines Police Department to further safety initiatives in the community.
“Many of these types of things that are funded, we would have had to have found a way to come up with the money anyway,” Robinson said. “[The grants] allow Ocean Pines to either focus their financial efforts on other things or if we need something else in addition, we can because the grant money is able to pay for these things… this funding will pay for things that Ocean Pines might struggle to try to pay for.”