Police-community tensions brought into focus by deadly confrontations have become a recurrent topic in the national media.

Altoona will soon be adopting a technology that can eliminate or defuse the uncertainty that can trigger such tension.

Body cameras for police was one of the 2018 innovations that Mayor Matt Pacifico mentioned Wednesday in his annual “State of the City” address.

Altoona police have used onboard cruiser cameras for a decade, according to Information Technology Director Victor Curfman.

Curfman has been negotiating with WatchGuard for about 24 of the body cams.

The city will pay for the equipment through capital funds.

The plan is for half of the cameras to be in use while the other half charges for the next shift, said Police Chief Janice Freehling.

The cameras have enough battery life to last for 11 hours of constant operation, although they wouldn’t be operating all the time, Curfman said.

Body cameras can offer protection for police and the people they interact with, because they provide an objective display of what happened, Freehling said.

Officials hope the body cams can be ready by the end of the summer, but that can’t happen until the city adopts a policy for their use, according Freehling and Curfman.

The police department has gathered some model policies from other jurisdictions and has begun discussions about devising its own, according to Freehling.

The idea would be to adopt a policy based on “best practices,” said City Manager Marla Marcinko.

There are many legal considerations that must go into developing a policy, solicitor Larry Clapper said.

A policy needs to include guidelines on how long to maintain video and audio recordings, which are sometimes needed for court cases; on how to deal with privacy issues, which come into play during bathroom breaks; on how to avoid violating the wiretap law, which generally prohibits audio recordings taken surreptitiously — although there is a presumption that the protection doesn’t apply during encounters with police, Clapper said.

Officers will be able to activate the cameras manually, Curfman said.