Mashantucket — Beginning the first week of January, members of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Police Department will become the first in the region to make the use of body cameras part of their everyday routine.

For police Chief William Dittman, the decision to join the growing number of forces with mobile cameras was an easy one.

"This is the state of Connecticut. It's going to be a mandate — we can see it coming," Dittman said. "We wanted to get ahead of the curve. We want to be the most proactive police department in the area."

The almost 30-member department began exploring the options more than a year ago, Dittman said, ultimately settling on the TASER body camera system.

Sitting in Dittman's office last week, Sgt. Andre Parker demonstrated the equipment.

Typically, Parker explained, officers will mount the mascara tube-shaped cameras on their shoulders.

Reaching his arm out in front of him while pivoting slightly, he showed how that mount is more likely to duplicate an officer's actual view than a camera centered in the middle of his or her chest.

Supervisors' cameras, he said, will clip neatly to the side of their clear eyeglasses.

In all cases, the no-hassle wireless camera battery packs — which feature just an on-off switch, a colored light to indicate battery fullness and a USB port for charging — sit in the officer's or supervisor's chest pocket.

"It's idiot-proof," Parker said with a laugh, explaining, on a more serious note, that when officers are under stress, equipment simplicity is key.

Parker, who spent the most time evaluating options, said the cameras should bring many benefits to the department.

The Mashantucket police, much like the Mohegans, already deal more in surveillance than the average municipal department.

With casino, hotel and parking garage property, few spots are left in the dark.

But the body cameras, with a wide-angle view and built-in audio, will reveal details the soundless, still camera footage often cannot, including who the aggressor is in a multi-person fight.

"In a case where you have multiple officers, multiple angles, that is going to do nothing but help you," Parker said.

In their research, Dittman said, Mashantucket police found that departments across the country reported stark drops in civilian complaints and in use-of-force incidents after adopting body cameras.

Indeed, from San Diego to Cleveland and Denver to Birmingham, Ala., declines have been observed.

Take San Diego, for example. In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that complaints against the department, which rolled out body cameras in January 2014, had fallen by 40.5 percent and use of "personal body" force by officers had dropped 46.5 percent.

A recent study University of South Florida researchers performed on the Orlando Police Department — where 46 officers wore cameras and 43 officers didn't — found similar results: from March 2014 to February this year, officers wearing the cameras saw 53 percent fewer use-of-force incidents and 65 percent fewer civilian complaints against them.

Everyone, Parker said, seems to behave more responsibly when they know they're being recorded.

Across the state, several departments — including Berlin, Branford, Milford, Naugatuck, South Windsor and Woodbury — have given body cameras a go.

With the state Office of Policy and Management set to begin offering departments monetary assistance for the devices in the new year, more likely will join that list.

In New London, where an ordinance former Mayor Daryl Finizio signed in October allotted $140,000 for body cameras and storage, police said they are working on logistical issues such as storage and ensuring compatibility with existing cruiser dashboard cameras before launching the program full-time.

Dittman estimates his department, which purchased the equipment "a few months ago," spent about $29,000 in total: $14,000 for the cameras and $15,000 for storage.

Figuring out the storage was the tricky part, Dittman and Parker said.

Ultimately, they settled on an internal system in which officers upload video to one computer, which transmits it to a server located on a different floor.

"The problem is, they charge you so much to hook into the cloud, and it's not secure," Dittman said. "Well, they say it's secure, but (people have) hacked the Pentagon. They can hack anything, but they can't hack this."

With the server's size, the two of them expect about 180 days' worth of video to be stored. That number could be lower during time periods where a higher-than-normal number of incidents have occurred, but should never be less than the 90 days the state currently recommends, Dittman said.

The cameras, Dittman and Parker noted, won't be on all the time.

Using a combination of common sense, the recently-released Police Officer Standards and Training Council guidelines — the reason the department didn't go live with the cameras sooner, Dittman said — and regulations Dittman pulled from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, officers will determine what "police business" is and turn their cameras on when it's occurring.

"Police business," Parker explained, could be talking to an intoxicated person, taking a statement, breaking up a fight or pulling over a car. Exceptions include, among other things, private officer-to-officer conversations and interviews with victims of sexual assault.

On some days, Dittman said, an officer may only record and upload 35 seconds of footage. Other days could be a different story.

Never, however, can an officer say, "Oh, I didn't really want to record that, I'm going to erase it," and follow through, Parker said.

To see and work with a video, an officer has to upload it to the computer, at which point only one person in the department has the authority to delete it, Parker explained.

This week, members of the department will finish their final week of training with the equipment.

Parker said he knows it may take a while before each member of the department turns the cameras on every time he or she should, but he's confident it soon "will become a habit."

"In researching it, we saw that departments' personnel didn't like (the cameras) initially," he said.

Today, Parker said, many of them feel differently: "They don't want to go out without them."

l.boyle@theday.com

Twitter: @LindsayABoyle