The rash of high-profile police shootings that have grabbed headlines and spurred vocal community protests in recent years has also accelerated law enforcement’s acquisition of body-worn cameras. Public safety officials are hoping that this approach will help increase transparency between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.
In fact, just last month, the Justice Department announced that it would be awarding $20 million in grants to help various law enforcement organizations outfit their personnel with body cameras.
In addition to providing a record of officers’ interactions with the public, body cameras have also been found to help deescalate tensions between law enforcement and citizens. According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Cambridge of nearly 2,000 officers across the UK and the U.S., the use of body-worn cameras was associated with a 93 percent reduction in citizen complaints against police.
“Cooling down potentially volatile police-public interactions to the point where official grievances against the police have virtually vanished may well lead to the conclusion that the use of body-worn cameras represents a turning point in policing,” Cambridge criminologist and lead author Dr. Barak Ariel said in a statement.
However, authorities say body cameras are not a panacea and that many issues remain in getting them deployed on a wide-scale basis. At the recently held ASIS 2016 conference in Orlando, two veteran law enforcement executives – Lt. Dan Zehnder, of the Las Vegas Police Department, and Scot Haug, chief of police for the Post Falls Idaho Police Department – took part in a session outlining some of the challenges that law enforcement agencies across the country still face when it comes to leveraging body-worn video.
Despite the mad dash to outfit officers at departments of all sizes with body cameras, there remains little in the way of formal policies about how law enforcement agencies should be using them. For example, many departments have been left on their own to decide when cameras should be recording (continuously or the outset of an interaction), how long the footage should be retained, where it should be retained (in the cloud or on premises), and when video should be made publicly available.
Zehnder said that even things that would seem simple, such as transferring video to share with prosecutors, has been a challenge for his department as the district attorney’s office uses outdated computer technology. In fact, he said some prosecutors still request that surveillance footage be copied to DVDs for them to use.
“There is an immense amount of challenge managing this,” he said.
Transparency
One of the primary reasons for having officers wear body cameras is to be able to increase the level of transparency between law enforcement and the general public when it comes to police interactions. However, even as more departments across the nation have begun using body-worn surveillance, there is no uniform policy with regards to the release of footage following an incident. Last month, authorities in Charlotte, N.C. were roundly criticized for not releasing body and dash cam video related to the shooting death of Keith Scott in a more timely fashion.
North Carolina lawmakers recently enacted a law that tightly regulates access to camera recordings. Under the law, which went into effect earlier this month, the release of video is left up to the discretion of law enforcement agencies unless a judge orders that it be turned over. Law enforcement officials are quick to point out that investigators need time to review any collected incident footage and that an immediate release could jeopardize a case.
Both Haug and Zehnder say they are in favor of full transparency and releasing footage to the public as soon as possible. According to Zehnder, spending thousands or, in some cases, millions of dollars to get a body camera program up and running would essentially be for naught if the recordings are not going to be made public. Haug says he has even pressed prosecutors in his jurisdiction about the need to release video in a timely manner.
Privacy Concerns
Another gray area when it comes to the deployment of body cameras is addressing privacy concerns – both for those being recorded and the officers who use them. Indeed, the voices of law enforcement have been among the loudest calling for greater privacy protections around body cameras.
Earlier this summer, officers in the Chicago suburb of Round Lake Park filed a lawsuit against the police department after they discovered that their body cameras recorded them using the bathroom and changing clothes. Law enforcement officers across the country have expressed similar concerns about cameras recording them when they are off duty.
While some have advocated for cops to be allowed to turn their cameras on and off during their shift depending on when they interact with the public, many believe that leaves to much discretion to officers as to what they are going to record and what they are not. Additionally, the aforementioned study actually found that assaults against officers increased when they turned on a camera during the middle of an interaction.
“The jolt of issuing a verbal reminder of filming at the start of an encounter nudges everyone to think about their actions more consciously. This might mean that officers begin encounters with more awareness of rules of conduct, and members of the public are less inclined to respond aggressively,” said Ariel.
To this point, Zehnder said that state legislatures, by and large, have done a poor job of balancing privacy with accountability.
The CSI Effect
Haug said that Post Falls has been on the “bleeding edge” of this technology as they were the first customer of body camera provider VIEVU in 2007. He said their department has obviously learned a lot of lessons along the way about the benefits and limitations of body-worn video but that managing the expectations of the public is still a challenge.
Because of the way video evidence is portrayed on television shows - providing investigators with a smoking gun in every incident - Haug said that is simply not the case in real world. People think that because an officer is wearing a body camera that the video will answer all questions about an event from beginning to end but oftentimes it doesn’t. For example, there was an incident where one of his officers became in involved in a shootout with a suspect but because he ducked behind his cruiser for cover, the body camera only recorded the car’s blinker light during the exchange of gunfire.
Potential Private Sector Use
Given the mostly positive reception these initiatives have received from both authorities and community leaders, some in the private sector have begun thinking about the prospect of providing body-word cameras to security guards and others on the frontlines of their organizations as a way to extend the reach of their existing surveillance system. Zehnder warns that when companies do decide to begin leveraging body cameras that they can expect to have everything in their organizations thoroughly reviewed. He agrees, however, that it’s only a matter of time before body-worn surveillance makes its way to private enterprises.
“Our society is changing, especially when it comes to video,” Zehnder said.
