FEATURE
View from the US: Body camera complications It was recently revealed that NZ Police has suspended a review of body cameras, thereby putting the brakes on its adoption of the technology. In the U.S., there’s been swings and roundabouts, writes Mark Tarallo in Security Management. Use of body-worn cameras, or body cams, by police departments continues to trend up. According to a survey released in August 2018 by the Police Executive Research Forum, more than 80 percent of U.S. police agencies are either using body cams now or have plans to do so in the near future. More than 85 percent of the departments that currently use body cams would recommend them to others.
“Body-worn cameras can demonstrate that a police agency is willing to be transparent and accountable for its actions. The conceptual appeal of bodyworn cameras has led to rapid adoption of the technology in police agencies across the country,” the report found. Other developments have helped drive this swift adoption. In late 2014, the Obama administration proposed the (US)$ 263 million Body-Worn Camera Partnership Program, a federally funded body-camera advocacy initiative for states and localities. The program was later approved. At around the same time, the police department in Rialto, California, participated in an influential study, Self-Awareness to Being Watched and SociallyDesirable Behavior: A Field Experiment on the Effect of Body-Worn Cameras on Police Use-of-Force. The study found that, during a year-long trial period of body cam use, public complaints against officers fell 88 percent compared with the previous 12 months. But lately, there have been a few reality checks. In 2017, Washington,
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D.C., officials released the surprising results of their own randomized controlled trial of body cam use by the city’s police department. The study found that body cam use had no detectable effects on police discretion, as measured by arrests for disorderly conduct. And the D.C. study featured more than 2,000 police officers, compared to 54 in the Rialto experiment. “These results suggest we should recalibrate our expectations” that body cams will cause a large-scale behavioral change in policing, particularly in contexts similar to Washington, D.C., the study explained. Another challenge is cost. Video storage can be expensive, especially when dealing with a high volume. These cost factors recently caused some police departments to drop, or consider dropping, their body cam programs, according to recent media reports.
For example, in February, Unified Police Department officers in Salt Lake County, Utah, said their agency may discontinue use of body cameras, partly due to the high costs for digital video storage. Previously, the department outfitted 125 of its 410 officers with body cams, using funding from a grant that expires this year. But supplying all officers would cost more than $400,000 per year, according to the agency. Cost can also present an issue for smaller departments, such as the one in East Dundee, a village suburb of Chicago. The police department there ordered body cameras for its 17 police officers. Before they could be put to use, a new police chief persuaded local officials to cancel the program. The chief argued that the $20,000 annual fee for the cameras and video storage could not be justified as a budget expense.
June/July 2019
