The push to bring on-body cameras to every police department in the country is rapidly moving forward. On Tuesday, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department made a request for $7 million to purchase 1,400 of them. In December 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department announced it was purchasing 7,000. In jurisdictions all over the country, these devices are being requested, purchased with public money, and deployed. And there's not much pushback. The White House is behind them. A recent study posted via Marginal Revolution found that "the number of complaints filed against officers dropped from 0.7 complaints per 1,000 contacts to 0.07 per 1,000 contacts" when on-body cameras were used. Even lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—who typically oppose government surveillance—have spoken out in favor. One recent ACLU report calls them "a win for all."
But there's a problem. The aforementioned report contains a very clear caveat: These cameras are only "a win for all" if there is "a framework of strong policies to ensure they protect the public without becoming yet another system for routine surveillance."
"Without such a framework," the report goes on, "their accountability benefits would not exceed their privacy risks."
One of those risks is that police can fail to record a serious interaction—and then walk away without punishment.
Such risks aren't theoretical. When a police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Antonio Martin in Berkeley, Mo., on Dec. 23, the officer had been issued a body camera, but it wasn't turned on when the shooting occurred. That forced investigators to rely on a bad angle from a low-resolution gas station surveillance camera. The question of whether the officer should be penalized over his failure to engage a device his department paid as much as $700 for—during the precise moment when it should've been engaged—has barely been raised. Once the shooting was declared justified, discussion all but ended.
There are also indications that, without proper policies, on-body cameras can be used to dissuade people from speaking up about potentially problematic police interactions. As the Atlantic pointed out on Tuesday, a report from the U.S. Department of Justice last year said that the "only certainty across the studies" about on-body police cameras was "fewer citizen complaints about police misbehavior." There are a multitude of reasons why that could be the case. The Atlantic post's authors offer one theory: "[C]itizens with a grievance are intimidated by the fact that police possess a record of their encounter to which the complaining citizen has no access."
Technological solutions have been proposed; one company has suggested a tool that would automatically turn on the camera when an officer is involved in a police interaction. But whether another gadget is needed to solve the problem is uncertain. One thing is clear, however: If the on-body camera revolution is going to continue, there should be clear policy rules. There should also be repercussions when officers fail to record.
"A body camera policy ... must have some teeth associated with it," said Jay Stanley, author of the ACLU report referenced above, in an e-mail to Bloomberg Businessweek. For Stanley, those teeth should include "not only a risk of disciplinary action but also perhaps an exclusionary rule for any evidence obtained in an unrecorded encounter"—meaning that if something major gets turned up by an officer in an unrecorded event, prosecutors can't use it at trial. He also suggests that whenever an officer fails to record, "that incident would create an evidentiary presumption against the officer."
Those are just suggestions, of course. And police unions and chiefs aren't likely to immediately adopt Stanley's suggestions. (A white paper on body cameras by the Police Executive Research Forum suggested only that "Officers who wear body-worn cameras should be required to articulate on camera or in writing their reasoning if they fail to record an activity that is required by department policy to be recorded.")
But with policy meetings occurring in major cities about how departments can deploy on-body cameras without antagonizing citizens, now's as good a time as any to debate both what's realistic and what's necessary.
Stroud is a reporter for Bloomberg News.
