New cameras installed in the San Joaquin County Jail very well may have saved a life last week.
According to the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, correctional officers last week noticed that a metal door plate was missing from a door inside of the facility and began looking for where it may have gone.
While the door itself was not covered by a security camera, officers were able to check footage of a nearby camera and witness an inmate attempting to conceal something that may have been the missing door plate beneath a sink in a common area near where the plate went missing.
Officers were able to recover the piece of metal — which measured 8-inches by 3-inches and had a part of a sock wrapped around it to make a handle — and remove it from circulation before it could have been used as a weapon to attack a fellow inmate or even a correctional officer.
The agency credited the camera system — the upgrade to which has been in process since last September, and will eventually blanket the facility with more than 200 cameras — with giving correctional staff the tools they needed to remove the threat before somebody was hurt or possibly killed.
“Had this metal plate remained inside the Unit, we have no doubt it would have been used to assault either another inmate or a Correctional Officer,” the agency wrote in the release announcing the incident. “Without our new camera system, and the diligence of the Correctional Officers in the Unit, it would have been much more difficult to find this improvised weapon before it was too late.
“We take the safety and security of our inmates very seriously, and this new camera system will only increase our ability to, hopefully, release people back into society better than when they came to us.”
While the new cameras will allow law enforcement to better protect themselves and the inmates within the facility, it will also provide a new level of transparency and accountability — hopefully preventing situations like the one that occurred back in 2019 when a Stockton man claimed he was beaten by jail staff.
The agency released the footage from the area where the incident occurred, but there was no coverage of the actual cell itself and the majority of the struggle was not captured — resulting in wildly-different stories of what happened.
Less than a month after that incident occurred and gained regional media traction, San Joaquin County Sheriff Pat Withrow, who had been on the job for approximately a year at that point, announced that the agency would be installing cameras in cells at the facility.
To contact Bulletin reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.
