September the 28th, 2024 – The Interior Ministry (MUP) has been preparing a huge project which will involve all Croatian police officers carrying cameras.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, all uniformed Croatian police officers will be equipped with cameras on their uniforms, the use of which will be mandatory during every single intervention. The project of purchasing this bodycam system and equipping the police officers will start in 2025, tportal has learned.
As confirmed to tportal by well-informed sources, funds for this purpose will be provided in the budget of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for next year.
“The recording of interventions will first of all serve to protect Croatian police officers from unjustified accusations being made against them, and then also to protect people from the possible overstepping of authority and the excessive use of force,” explained one of tportal’s interlocutors.
As announced, this project scheduled for next year will be presented to the public in the coming weeks.
Back in 2015, as part of the e-police project, the Ministry of Internal Affairs launched a project called “System for managing police cameras”, which wasn’t fully implemented or finished, either. The system was then established across ten locations – in six police stations of the Zagreb Police Department and in four more police departments in Osijek-Baranja, Primorje-Gorski Kotar, Istria and Split-Dalmatia. At each location, 20 e-cameras were set up, as was an application for monitoring the debiting and disbursement of cameras and for saving recorded footage.
The general public will most likely, remember that at that time the Interior Ministry published a video of an intervention in Osijek, when a police officer brutally treated an elderly woman who crossed the road while the traffic light was red. After that, there were mostly no official recordings made in public. It begs the question as to why when it came so conveniently after such an incident, but it seems the problem will be resolved.
