Police Body Cameras

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Police Body Cameras

Body worn cameras have come to Cincinnati police. We support the ACLU recommendation that the cameras be universally deployed and always on.

Support for this technology is broad-based, yet there is an ongoing need for responsible political leadership from City Council. The technology will be nothing but an expensive gimmick if political leadership does not insist on civil oversight and accountability.

Cincinnati had already begun testing on-body cameras under Chief Streicher. Building on the success of the Collaborative Agreement, Streicher and his former adversary, ACLU lawyer Scott Greenwood have partnered to lead a now international call for body-worn police cameras. Streicher exhorted a local law-enforcement seminar that “Identifying, collecting and preserving the best evidence about every encounter between the police officer and the community is a duty. It’s an ethical, legal and moral responsibility. You can’t afford not to have it.” They point to millions in potential savings in civil litigation and police overtime costs. The first controlled study has already demonstrated an 88% drop in citizen complaints and a 60% reduction in police use of force the first year after the cameras’ deployment in Rialto California. A record of police interactions can put all parties on their best behavior and prevent frivolous or false complaints.

Still, Arizona State University criminologist Michael White, noting the lack of hard evidence in a literature review for the Department of Justice, cautioned that ”most of the claims made about the technology are untested.” Cambridge criminologist Barak Ariel, co-author of the much-hyped but small Rialto study, notes the jury is still out on the cameras’ empirical effectiveness. The mechanism of deterrence on police or civilian behavior has not fully understood. Indeed, this deterrence may be entirely asymmetrical in practice, chilling citizen behavior without combatting police misconduct. ACLU Senior Policy Analyst Jay Stanley explains that police control of the cameras undermines any potential they have for civil oversight. Police shootings in Albuquerque have continued to climb despite the introduction of the cameras in 2012. Policies are violated and cameras are simply turned off or broken in critical incidents there and in cities like New Orleans, Salt Lake City and Oakland.

Our confidence in the police investigations of David Hebert’s killing was undermined by numerous improprieties, irregularities, and mischaracterizations of evidence. Among these was the lack of recorded evidence. When Bones was shot, six different cruiser cameras began recording video. With the exception of Lt. Milek, all officers deliberately turned their cameras off as soon as possible, to avoid recording the crime scene. Without explanation, audio was missing from half of the video recordings, precisely the three with microphones within range of the involved officers, Mitchell and their immediate supervisors: those of Dawson, Kneller and Milek. Officers are required to check recording equipment and report malfunctions at the start of every shift. Yet there was no discipline for this breach of procedure and Lt. Matzen of the Police Records Unit later explained that no record is kept of “malfunctioning” recording equipment. A public records request for the daily activity logs of involved officers and maintenance records of the affected vehicles was simply ignored.

Controversial Officer Orlando Smith is the poster child for body cameras.

The use of audio and video recording for civil oversight of police has always been frustrated in Cincinnati. The Collaborative Agreement has not improved this situation. One example is Officer Orlando Smith’s suspiciously “malfunctioning” camera in two critical incidents. Chief Blackwell promised to send the camera to the FBI for forensic investigation, but a public records request by Friends of Bones returned no evidence of any communication with outside agencies on the subject. Long-serving Lieutenant Steve Kramer, former major fraud investigations commander and current president of the Police Historical Society, confessed “I, along with every cop that ever had one in his car, have tried to figure out how to tamper with them”. Kramer’s rhetorical point was that the cameras were supposedly tamperproof, but his criminal admission is a damning indictment of CPD culture. Recent microphone sabotage scandals are proof of concept. Last year in Los Angeles, Southeastern Division officers deliberately broke off 72 of 160 antennae in order to cripple the microphones’ transmission range. In Chicago over 80% of the 850 cruiser cameras in use have non-functioning audio, in part due to “intentional destruction.” What Cincinnati police need more than anything is tamperproof technology.

Chief Blackwell was right to note that the technology is in itself no panacea; it’s only as good as the police operating it. To deliver on its promise as an accountability tool, it will require strict policies backed by consequential discipline and strong leadership. Blackwell has repeatedly declared his department to one of “truth-telling and transparency.” Yet in his December 8, 2014 report to the Law and Public Safety Committee, the former chief made it clear that there will be missing video as a matter of policy and that “officer safety” will be an available excuse for leaving the cameras off:

I don’t want my officers to divert their attention from being safe, even for a millisecond, to turn a camera on. And so there will be times when the camera may not be on. There will be times when it won’t actually capture the data that people think they want to see, the video they want to see.

This policy pronouncement signals to officers that circumvention of civil oversight will be tolerated and even encouraged. This is unacceptable. Successful implementation of this technology as an accountability tool necessitates that cameras be always-on and out of the control of officers. Friends of Bones strongly endorses the ALCU’s policy recommendations. Privacy concerns should be addressed through common sense retention and consent policies and an independent body like the Citizen Complain Authority should control the recordings. In the words of former Chief Streicher, who began the body camera program, “The officer who doesn’t want to be recorded is the first officer you put the camera on.”

Police Body Cameras

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