Police Body Cameras

A fairly common recommendation for reducing police misconduct is to increase

use of body cameras. By recording police-citizen encounters, police supervisors,
judges, reporters, and others can get objective evidence of what happened
instead of self-serving hearsay.
The proposal is gaining popularity, but it is also more complicated than most
people realize. First, there are privacy concerns for persons who do not want
their police encounters on the evening news or splashed across social media.
Second, the costs involved in maintaining a body camera system are not
insignificant. Those costs have to be weighed against other police needs and
other reform measures.
Do police body cameras improve police behavior?
The short answer is that it is too early to tell. However, the results from the
several studies on police body cameras are encouraging.
One of the most cited police body camera studies was conducted in Rialto,
California between February 2012 and February 2013. During the trial, 54 front
line officers were randomly assigned to either wear body cameras or to not wear
the cameras while on shift. Of the 988 shifts examined by researchers, officers
wore body cameras in 489 and did not in 499. Researchers compared the
number of use-of-force incidents and complaints against police in the trial period
to previous years. The results, based on data from the trial, are below.

At first glance, it might be tempting to correlate the reduction in use-of-force

incidents and complaints against the police with the introduction of body
cameras. But, it is important to keep in mind that the Rialto trial began in
February 2012; only a month after a new chief took over the department. The
new chief, William A. Farrar, was one of the authors of the Rialto study and he
implemented several reforms after starting his new job. Thus, it is difficult to
determine now much of the decline in use-of-force incidents and complaints can
be directly attributed to the police body cameras. The Rialto study also cannot
explain whether the drop in use-of-force incidents and complaints can be
attributed to police or citizens changing their behavior. As the researchers wrote,
we do not know on which party in an encounter the cameras have had an effect
on, or how the two effects on officers and on suspects interact.
While it is the case that police body cameras cannot conclusively be shown to
improve citizen or police behavior this is not in and of itself an argument against
the use of police body cameras. Body camera footage has proved valuable in
investigations into police misconduct.
What are the privacy implications of body cameras?
Police body cameras raise privacy concerns. The indiscriminate release of body
camera footage could have a devastating effect on the victims of crime. Those

crafting police body camera policy have to effectively balance privacy with the
desire to hold police officers accountable for their actions.
What does such a policy look like? Legislators, law enforcement organizations,
and civil liberty groups have all made police body camera recommendations.
However, some police departments that use body cameras either do not have
policies in place or do not release them.
In October 2014 the ACLU asked twenty of the largest police departments as
well as 10 departments that attended a body camera conference hosted by the
Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) for their body camera policies.
According to the ACLUs Sonia Roubini, Only five of these thirty departments
sent me their policies. The remaining twenty-five cited various reasons for not
doing so. Of those five departments only one had its police body camera policy
available online.
It is especially important that body camera policies be public because the nature
of a police officers job means that he will often see citizens at tragic and
embarrassing moments. There is an understandable concern related to the
release of footage involving not only victims of crime but also children, accidents,
and the inside of private residences, hospitals, and schools.
Lawmakers across the U.S. have responded to privacy concerns in a variety of
ways. In North Dakota the governor signed a bill exempting police body camera
footage taken in a private place from public record requests, while in Florida
and Michigan lawmakers introduced bills which would limit the release of police
body camera footage captured inside a citizens home. Floridas bill, SB 248,
would also limit the release of footage captured within health care, mental
health care, or social services facilities as well as at the scene of a medical
emergency involving a death or involving an injury that requires transport to a
medical facility. Proposed New Hampshire legislation would require police
officers to wear body cameras, but would exempt the footage from public record
requests.
Civil liberty groups and non-profits have also made body camera policy
proposals. Police Executive Research Forum published a paper on implementing

a police body camera policy, which recommended that some recordings should
be prohibited. Among the recordings PERF recommended prohibiting are those
of strips searches, conversations with informants, and those that take place
where a reasonable expectation of privacy exists.
An ACLU paper said that the release of body camera footage should depend on
whether the footage is flagged or unflagged. Flagged footage would include
footage that captures use-of-force incidents, arrests, detentions, or an incident
subject to a complaint. Unflagged footage would be footage that does not include
the flagged incidents just described.
The paper recommends that unflagged footage be deleted after weeks, and that
unflagged and unredacted footage should not be released without the consent of
the subject. Flagged footage should be available to the public even in cases
when redaction is not possible because in such cases the need for oversight
generally outweighs the privacy interests at stake.
The storing and redaction of body camera footage is a time consuming as well
as expensive undertaking. During the time of a police body camera study in
Mesa, Arizona, three police body camera videos were forwarded to the Mesa
Police Department Video Services Unit. The videos, which ranged from one to
two hours long, took a total of 30.5 hours to edit for redaction. 1
In May 2015 the Associated Press reported that Cleveland expected to spend at
least half a million dollars a year simply to store, maintain, and replace the body
cameras. The AP also reported that the combined cost of 1,500 Taser body
cameras and the data storage could be up to $3.3 million over five years.
TheAlbany Democrat-Herald reported that body camera footage storage was
affecting the court system in Linn County, Oregon. The body cameras being
used by two police agencies in the county have significantly contributed to the
amount of data being stored by the Linn County District Attorneys office, which
in 2011 had 45 gigabytes of media downloads, compared with 351 gigabytes of
downloaded evidence in the first three months of 2015.
Improvements in technology will undoubtedly make the redaction and storage of
police body camera footage less expensive. But, for the foreseeable future, the

redaction and storage of police body camera footage will continue to impose a
significant cost to law enforcement agencies. Indeed, cost is sometimes cited by
police agencies as a reason why body cameras have not been deployed. In
2014 PERF conducted a survey of police departments and found that 39
percent of the respondents that do not use body-worn cameras cited cost as a
primary reason.
It is possible that some of the fiscal impact of police body camera footage
redaction and storage could be offset by the impact the cameras have on
litigation arising from bogus complaints. However, it remains to be seen if that
will be the case.
Of course the cost of a police body camera policy will depend in part on what
footage is redacted. As noted above, redaction contributes to the cost of body
camera programs. A policy that strictly limits redaction of footage captured in
public and redacts some material filmed inside a private residence would be less
expensive (all else being equal) than a policy that requires a heavy degree of
redaction of footage captured in public.
What does the increased use of body cameras mean for American
policing?
It is still too soon to tell. As mentioned above, it is not yet clear what effect, if any,
body cameras have on citizens or police officers. In addition, it is the case that
instances of police misconduct have occurred despite the officers involved
wearing body cameras. This shouldnt be too surprising given that police officers
have been caught behaving poorly in front of dash cams.
But, the use of police body cameras is supported across political and racial
demographics, as the following graphs based on April 2015 YouGov polling
show:2

In the coming years an increasing number of Americans will come to expect that
their police officers be equipped with body cameras. Advances in technology will
make this expectation more pronounced as the cost of using police body
cameras decreases.
While police body cameras do have potential to improve law enforcement
accountability and provide extra evidence, they are not a police misconduct
panacea. Reducing incidents of police misconduct requires not only body
cameras, but also reforms of use-of-force policy and training as well as changes
to how police misconduct is investigated.
Conclusion

The research on police body cameras is limited but

encouraging.

Police body cameras do pose privacy concerns, but those

concerns can be resolved with the right policies in place.


The public widely supports police officers wearing body
cameras, but the technology alone is not a panacea for police
misconduct.