Image from Evidence.com.

The City Council is set to consider a contract to purchase body cameras for Alameda police and access to a system that will store all the video they record.

Police Chief Paul J. Rolleri will ask the council Tuesday to spend $424,752.61 for 80 AXON Flex cameras made by Taser International and for use of the company’s secure servers for storage and management. The contract would be in effect for five years.

In a report to the council, Rolleri said officers who tested the cameras found they could help resolve criminal cases without a trial and also, make subjects more compliant and reduce complaints against officers. Studies of departments that use the cameras showed a reduction of use of force incidents, complaints against officers, lawsuits and court overtime costs, he wrote.

The police department plans to pay for the cameras using state grant money and unspent funds from its current-year budget.

A rash of officer-involved shootings in cities across the country has prompted calls for officers to begin wearing the cameras to record interactions with police, and on May 1, the federal government announced a grant program that could help a handful of departments cover some of their cost.

The International Association of Police Chiefs has sanctioned officers’ use of the cameras; a recent study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology based on a randomized trial found that officers using the cameras documented half the number of force incidents as those who didn’t and had only a tenth of the number of personnel complaints.

But even proponents note that the cameras could raise concerns about privacy and about how the information they capture will be share with the public.

Rolleri said the department is drafting a policy that will address this and other issues.

Alameda police have used digital audio recorders since 2006, and the department has been testing different digital cameras since 2012. In his report, Rolleri said the cameras the department wants to buy are smaller than other models officers tested, and can be worn on an officer’s head to offer video from his or her point of view. The company’s storage website shows a camera attached to the side of a pair of glasses.

The cameras are continually recording and will capture 30 seconds of video before an officer turns them on, the staff report to council says. The video is uploaded directly to Taser’s cloud-based storage system, its website says.

If approved, the cameras, which are one of several tools the department wants to implement to reduce and better track its use of force in the field, could be in use by the end of the summer, Rolleri said.

The council meeting begins at 7 p.m. Tuesday in council chambers at City Hall, 2263 Santa Clara Avenue, and will be broadcast live on Comcast cable channel 15, AT&T cable channel 99 and on the city’s website.