It’s been nearly five years since Delaware House Bill 195 (HB195) passed in July 2021 — a law meant to enforce the use of body-worn cameras (BWC) for Delaware’s local and state law enforcement agencies — and only one municipal police department in Delaware has achieved full compliance.
The Delaware Center for Justice teamed up with the Policing Project at New York University School of Law to analyze BWC policy compliance with HB195 for police officers, certain employees at the Department of Corrections and at the Services for Children, Youth, and Their Families, as well as school resource officers, to create a report published in December 2025.
Legal experts “obtained five BWC policies from local law enforcement agencies, although we queried 36 local and state agencies for their policies. Only one of the five BWC policies we reviewed was legally sufficient.”
The Milford Police Department was the only police department found to be in full compliance, according to the report. It has adopted the minimum standards for BWCs set out in the bill and enforced by the Police Officer Standards and Training Commission (POST), its oversight committee, and codified the standards in its agency policy “with no deviations.”
POST (referred to in the report as COPT, its name prior to 2023) is responsible for setting and enforcing HB195, including who must wear body cameras and when. At the center of the bill is the provision that BWCs must be worn while on duty “in a role that is likely to result in interaction with the public.” POST is also responsible for maintaining “standards for the activation, wear, training, testing, handling, storage, and dissemination of BWCs and their data.”
Other police department BWC policies that were examined include Delmar, Wilmington, and Cheswold, as well as the New Castle County Department of Public Safety, which oversees the New Castle County Police.
Milford, Delmar, Wilmington, and Cheswold were found to be the only municipalities among 31 surveyed to have made their BWC policies publicly available. A 2016 version of the Delaware State Police BWC policy is also publicly available online.
Newark and Elsmere “do not have published policies available online, but appear to have extant policies based on references to such policies in the local collective bargaining agreement and police accountability committee, respectively.”
They note that POST regulations “do not require agencies to publish their policies on a public website,” and that “because of this lack of transparency, we have been unable to assess the full implementation of the policy mandate. The regulations should be updated to require agencies to publish their BWC policies on their website.”
Delmar, Wilmington, and Cheswold, and the New Castle County Police were found to be in partial compliance, with areas of deficiency that did not align with POST’s recommendations.
“Delmar’s policy does not specify when BWCs must be worn,” nor does it specify that “any officer likely to interact with the public must wear a BWC while on duty.”
“Wilmington’s policy does not include a subsection of situations where officers are not required to wear a BWC,” such as “when undercover, in administrative positions, hostage or crisis negotiations, meeting with confidential sources, when not in uniform, when engaging in collective bargaining, and in extraordinary circumstances (e.g. riot or large concert) where an agency has so many officers they cannot provide each with a BWC.”
Cheswold policy on BWCs is simply outdated, remaining unchanged since 2016, and thus “predating the requirements” of HB195 and POST regulations.
Obtaining BWC footage itself is a heated issue among police reform activists in Delaware. ACLU Delaware argues that the notoriously difficult process impedes police accountability and transparency due to the state’s strict adherence to the Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights (LEOBOR).
The report notes that POST “has not created any guidelines for when the public may access BWC footage, nor has it directed how long BWC data must be stored.”
“The regulations should be updated to create a mechanism for the public to access footage of critical incidents, especially those involving alleged police misconduct,” and that POST “should set a floor for retention of BWC footage, requiring at a minimum that footage be retained until after all internal investigations for misconduct and any subsequent legal actions are completed.”
POST executive director Sean Moriarty said in an email that it is “currently working on a comprehensive review, with changes and updates to its regulations, which has been sent to the Register of Regulations” and that the committee “expects the regulations to be open for public comment with the Register in February.”
Ongoing public engagement is encouraged, said Moriarty, “during any of the POST and DPAC quarterly meetings.” The next one is April 14 at 1:00 p.m.