Police body camera Friend or Foe?

In the United States of America, it is commonly seen that police officers often wear body-worn cameras. These are widely used by state and or district-level law enforcement agencies. These agencies require that their officers wear body cameras in the course of performing their duties. Usually, these duties include officers to be in direct contact with civilians. However, certain privacy-related issues have been raised in regard to the same and as such there are mixed opinion on body cameras. Let us have a brief discussion on its positive and negative effects.

Certain Findings Suggest:[1]

1. They provide transparency,
2. Protect civil rights,
3. Body cameras can act as evidence,
4. Can be held as tools of accountability,
5. Certain law enforcement agencies have their own version of policies and programs in regard to body cam and specifically protect categories of vulnerable individuals (i.e., victims of sex crimes) from being recorded without their informed consent.
6. Policies are to be created in a way that is logged and audited by a specific authority and no one else. This way we avoid the tampering and misuse of any footage and or any unauthorized access to the footage.
7. As of November 2017, of the 69 “major city” departments in the U.S., 62 now have body-worn camera programs with policies in place. Three of those major departments appear to have cameras on the ground but have not released their policies to the public — Buffalo, Suffolk County, and Tulsa.
8. Even when departments have policies in place, over a third (28 of 68) don’t make them easily and publicly available on their department websites, which hinders robust public debate about how body cameras should be used. Many of the policies we analyzed were found externally on other websites.
9. Increasingly, departments are establishing explicit procedures that allow recorded individuals — like those seeking to file a police misconduct complaint — to view the footage of their own incidents. Four departments we analyzed — in Cincinnati, Las Vegas, Parker (CO) and Washington DC — now appear to provide special access to recorded individuals. These special access rights, tailored specifically for body camera footage, exist alongside state-level public records laws.
10. None of the department policies we analyzed have a blanket limitation on officer review of footage before filing an initial written incident report. Only thirteen departments have partial prohibitions in place, for certain critical incidents like officer shootings. The vast majority of departments (55) allow officers unrestricted footage review.
11. Due to concerns from civil rights groups about the increased potential for surveillance, leading departments have begun to include limits on their use of biometric technologies, like facial recognition, together with camera footage. In our initial release, only Baltimore’s policy addressed facial recognition. Since then, Baltimore County, Boston, Cincinnati, Montgomery County, Parker (CO), and Seattle have all followed suit. Additionally, Baltimore strengthened its policy since our first analysis.

“Body cameras are sweeping the nation and becoming, along with the badge and gun, standard issue for police officers. These cameras are intended to ensure accountability for abusive police officers. But, if history is any guide, the videos they produce will more commonly be used to prosecute civilians than to document abuse. Further, knowing that the footage will be available as evidence, police officers have an incentive to narrate body camera videos with descriptive oral statements that support a later prosecution. Captured on an official record that exclusively documents the police officer’s perspective, these statements—for example, “he just threw something into the bushes” or “your breath smells of alcohol”—have the potential to be convincing evidence. Their admissibility is complicated, however, by conflicting currents in evidence law.”[2]

After widespread protests of shootings of civilians by police officers in 2014, a broad consensus arose around the need to outfit police officers with body-worn video cameras.[3] Proposals to push police departments to purchase and use these so-called “body cameras” obtained “overwhelming support from every stakeholder in the controversy—the public, the White House, federal legislators, police officials, police unions, and the American Civil Liberties Union.”[4] In New York City, the federal district court that found that city’s infamous “Stop and Frisk” program unconstitutional ordered implementation of a body camera program as a remedy.[5] The judge explained that “body-worn cameras are uniquely suited to addressing the constitutional harms” of abusive policing.[6] The New York City Police Department responded with a plan to issue 18,000 body cameras by the end of 2018,[7] and New York’s mayor “promised to expand the program to all patrol officers by 2019.”[8] Similar progress outfitting police officers with body cameras can be found across the nation.[9]

Police body cameras are compact devices that can create both audio and visual records of police officer actions, observations, and interactions with the public.”[10] The cameras are small and versatile enough to be worn almost anywhere on a police officer’s person.[11] Like badges, firearms, or radios, these miniature devices are becoming an essential part of the modern police officer’s gear.[12]  Prior to 1980, there were few, if any, dash cams in police patrol cars.[13] Around that time, police departments began installing dash cams to help secure drunk-driving convictions.[14] A second, more powerful, impetus for dash cams came in the 1990s over concerns about racial bias and profiling.[15] At least in limited circumstances, dashcams could promote police accountability.[16]

“The position of the camera means those watching the footage see the situation from the officer’s perspective. The camera acts as an independent witness. The camera records the footage onto an internal storage device. At the end of the officer’s shift, the footage is uploaded to a secure location so it can be used as evidence at court or other legal proceedings or deleted if it’s not needed. When the camera is turned on it will start capturing a rolling 60-second loop of video but no audio. This 60-second video is not saved by the camera unless the officer activates the camera to record. When the camera is activated to record the previous 60 seconds of video is included in the recording. Officers activate their cameras at the start of an incident or encounter, and under normal circumstances will continue to record until it’s no longer ‘proportionate or necessary’ or another system takes over, e.g. CCTV within a police station. The use of BWV is incident-specific; unless they’re part of a specific operation, officers won’t be recording as part of normal patrolling.”[17]

Also Read – Expert Witnesses

[1] Police Body Worn Cameras: A Policy Scorecard (bwcscorecard.org)

[2] Bellin, Jeffrey and Pemberton, Shevarma, "Policing the Admissibility of Body Camera Evidence" (2019). Faculty Publications. 1904. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/1904.

[3] Howard M. Wasserman, Moral Panics and Body Cameras, 92 WASH. U. L. REV. 831, 831–32 (2015).

[4] Id. at 832–33 (citations omitted); see also Jocelyn Simonson, Copwatching, 104 CALIF. L. REV. 391, 396 (2016) (describing the use of police body cameras as “a practice hailed of late by scholars, politicians, and activists alike”).

[5] Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 668, 685 (S.D.N.Y. 2013).

[6] Id.; accord Leadholm v. City of Commerce City, No. 16-cv-02786-MEH, 2017 WL 1862313, at *3 (D. Colo. May 9, 2017) (noting that the implementation of body cameras may assist victims of police civil rights violations).

[7] Gina Cherelus, New York City Says Accelerating Rollout of Police Body Cameras, REUTERS (Jan. 30, 2018, 6:38 PM), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-new-york- bodycameras/new-york-city-says-accelerating-rollout-of-police-body-camerasidUSKBN1FJ34X [https://perma.cc/P772-NP2L].

[8] Ashley Southall, Do Body Cameras Help Policing? 1,200 New York Officers Aim to Find Out, N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 26, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/nyregion/dobody-cameras-help-policing-1200-new-york-officers-aim-to-find-out.html [https://perma.cc/ 6WJW-R86B].

[9] See Jocelyn Simonson, Beyond Body Cameras: Defending a Robust Right to Record the Police, 104 GEO. L.J. 1559, 1565 (2016) (noting that at least thirty-six states have proposed some form of legislation involving “police-worn cameras”).

[10] Dru S. Letourneau, Note, Police Body Cameras: Implementation with Caution, Forethought, and Policy, 50 U. RICH. L. REV. 439, 442 (2015); see also NAT’L INST. OF JUSTICE, U.S. DEP’T OF JUSTICE, A PRIMER ON BODY-WORN CAMERAS FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT 5 (2012) (describing body cameras as “mobile audio and video capture devices that allow officers to record what they see and hear”).

[11] Mary D. Fan, Justice Visualized: Courts and the Body Camera Revolution, 50 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 897, 901 (2017) (describing police body cameras as “[s]mall enough to be worn on the head, ear, or chest”); see also NAT’L INST. OF JUSTICE, supra note 22, at 5 (noting that body cameras “can be attached to various body areas, including the head, by helmet, glasses or other means, or to the body by pocket, badge or other means of attachment”)

[12] See, e.g., Devin Coldewey, Cop Watch: Who Benefits When Law Enforcement Gets Body Cams?, NBC NEWS (Aug. 17, 2013, 11:08 AM), https://www.nbcnews.com/technology/ cop-watch-who-benefits-when-law-enforcement-gets-body-cams-6C10911746 [https://perma.cc/Y7U7-M662]; Peter Hermann & Rachel Weiner, Issues over Police Shooting in Ferguson Lead Push for Officers and Body Cameras, WASH. POST (Dec. 2, 2014), https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/issues-over-police-shooting-in-ferguson-leadpush-for-officers-and-body-cameras/2014/12/02/dedcb2d8-7a58-11e4-84d4- 7c896b90abdc_story.html [https://perma.cc/793J-FJHY] (stating that body cameras will become “standard police equipment”); Dave Lucas, NY AG Announces Program to Provide Funding for Police Body Cameras, WAMC (July 30, 2018), http://www.wamc.org/post/nyag-announces-program-provide-funding-police-body-cameras [http://perma.cc/HQ62-HZN2] (“The devices have become standard issue in many police departments.”).

[13] INT’L ASS’N OF CHIEFS OF POLICE, THE IMPACT OF VIDEO EVIDENCE ON MODERN POLICING 5 (2004).

[14] Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) advocated for the use of video cameras to preserve evidence of police officer encounters with drunk drivers to improve the likelihood of convictions. Id.

[15] See Id.

[16] See Id.

[17] How and when BWV cameras are used | Metropolitan Police