Local law enforcement explore body cameras
A state of emergency was declared in Baltimore earlier this week following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody in April.
It was one uprising in a series of several that have caught the attention of the nation since Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson last August.
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Pullman Police Officer Shane Emerson wears a body camera in Pullman Wednesday. Pullman police have used the technology for two years.
The events have brought national attention to a slew of issues, but one discussion that’s been pushed to the front of mainstream talking points is the use of body cameras by police officers.
The debate has prompted police departments nationwide to examine their own programs, and while many more agencies are moving forward with updated technologies, University of Idaho law professor Don Burnett said body cameras on police officers is not a new idea.
“The technology has been evolving for some time,” Burnett said. “Certainly highly publicized incidents have given greater public visibility to the issue, but my impression is that law enforcement agencies have been studying this and not simply being spurred on by highly publicized events.”
This is certainly true on the Palouse, where body cameras have been on the radar of both the Pullman and Moscow police departments for several years. While the Pullman Police Department (PPD) has utilized body camera systems for a few years already, the Moscow Police Department (MPD) is in the early stages of planning for implementation.
Criminal defense attorney Steve Martonick said he knows the value of good audiovisual technology from a police department when it comes to judicial proceedings.
“You just get so much from video you don’t get from audio,” Martonick said. “If the officer’s looking through the trunk, with just audio, you can’t see what he’s pulling out or where he’s looking, you just hear audio saying, ‘That’s mine, no, that’s not mine and you wouldn’t have a clue’ — video’s got a huge advantage.”
Martonick said he recalls a time when Pullman police officers were occasionally more aggressive. In the last decade, he’s defended a student who was pepper sprayed in his driveway following a noise complaint, as well as a student who was tased after refusing to sit on the ground following an incident of vandalism, he said.
Martonick said he thinks the largest-scale incident happened in 2007, when police officers used pepper spray in a Pullman dance club, affecting approximately 300 people and resulting in a $22 million class action lawsuit. The officers were ultimately cleared of all civil-rights violations and issued an apology to all innocent victims, he said.
In the last five years, Martonick said excessive use of force within the PPD has almost entirely dissipated.
He said the implementation of police body cameras by the department two years ago could have only helped.
Pullman’s third eye
The PPD was one of the first agencies in Washington to implement a mandatory body camera program, effectively completing its transition phase April 1, 2013. The department now uses a total of 34 body and flex cameras.
PPD Chief Commander of Operations Chris Tennant said the department decided to move forward with a body camera program because it reflected the values of the officers.
“The chief is really into community oriented policing,” Tennant said. “It means something different to anyone you talk to, but transparency and communicating with the public and opening up lines of communication is a big part of that.”
According to Deanne Anderson, a records staff member with the Washington State University Police Department, WSU police also utilize body cameras to protect both the students and staff on campus and the police officers patrolling and responding to calls in the area.
The program isn’t perfect, and many police departments nationwide remain reluctant to implement similar programs, despite a federal push, said Gary Jenkins, PPD police chief.
“It’s expensive,” Jenkins said. “There’s an initial cost to buy all the hardware, there’s the maintenance and upkeep of it whether you have to do repairs or replace them and storage is another issue — you have to determine whether to do it in-house or have a vendor do it for you, and what the cost is going to be for that is another issue.”
Implementation of the Pullman program cost $65,000 for hardware, including cameras, docking stations, mounts, as well as extended maintenance and storage. After the initial three years, the annual cost of the program is $3,000 for storage and $6,000 for maintenance.
Jenkins said many departments are still wary of the repercussions of failed documentation when documentation is expected — in worst-case type scenarios, equipment failure or the forgetfulness of an officer could have massive backlash for an agency.
“There’s definitely a learning curve,” Tennant said. “It sounds silly, but it’s human nature. The fact is that a lot of these officers have been doing this for a very long time, and it hasn’t included turning a camera on and off.”
Tennant said the use of cameras is most vital during stressful operations — when officers were most likely to forget to use them.
“The equipment is manual, so the officer has to keep turning it on and turning it off, and if they’re engaged in some operation that’s potentially deadly, that may be the last thing on his mind,” Jenkins said.
There are also issues that need to be addressed in the legislature, Jenkins said. As a two-party consent state, questions remain about what officers have the right to record and how cameras in use public the footage should be.
Public records issues aren’t just privacy issues, either, Jenkins said — it’s also a logistical one. The PPD realized this firsthand when someone requested all body camera footage throughout the state of Washington.
“At the time, we had 1.93 terabytes of video — approximately 2,500 hours,” Jenkins said. “If it were just a matter of selecting the video and releasing it, it wouldn’t be an issue. But the issue comes with complying with public records laws.”
He said some public records laws require redaction of certain identifying information, and the redaction of that footage would be left up to the departments.
“We would have to look through every minute of video, determine anything we have to redact, and then redact the audio or do something to blur part of the video before we can release it, and that would have been a monumental task,” Jenkins said.
Tennant said legislative action is the biggest hurdle to deal with for body camera technology and implementation to continue to develop.
“It needs to be addressed fairly soon,” Tennant said. “I think there needs to be a more realistic set of expectations by all parties involved as to what cameras are able to provide and not provide.”
Jenkins said as the technology itself continues to develop, he foresees it becoming more automated or voice activated. As the technology is refined, Jenkins said it would minimize the already small downside to police body camera programs.
According to Jenkins, the footage has been valuable as a means of public debriefing in criminal cases and as learning tools for the officers themselves. It’s also been used to ensure accuracy in police reports, accountability to the public and efficiency in training.
It has also, as many national movers and shakers have pointed out in recent months, given departments the opportunity to examine their officers’ use of force.
Jenkins said reviewing body camera footage has only made him more confident in PPD officers’ abilities to do their jobs — but the buffer of the camera doesn’t go underappreciated.
“It’s not that officers were not conducting business inappropriately before the cameras,” Jenkins said. “You’re just more likely going to ensure that all of your contacts are going to be to our expectations.”
On the flip side, Jenkins said he has noticed individuals acting more civil once they knew they were on camera. He said there have been several specific cases where someone threatened to make a complaint, but after seeing footage of their interaction with the police officer they decided not to.
He said it also tends to encourage individuals who might otherwise have been belligerent to be more cooperative.
Jenkins said for this reason, the cameras have been well received internally — officers generally believe the camera is a tool to help them do their jobs more effectively.
“It’s, in my opinion, the biggest enhancement for law enforcement in decades,” Jenkins said. “To me, there’s very little downside, but again, you have to have the support of the city administration, you have to be able to fund it and internally be able to develop a policy and implement it.”
Moscow plans for utilization
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Paul Kwiatkowski of the Moscow Police Department drives through town with a camera Wednesday.
The MPD has watched Pullman’s implementation of body camera technology closely. MPD officers currently employ only pocket audio recorders and dashboard cameras in their cruisers.
MPD Chief David Duke said the department started exploring the option of body cameras in 2008.
“The officers were asking for this technology a couple years ago, just because they thought it was a benefit while they were working,” Duke said.
When the recession hit, Duke said the camera vendor went bankrupt and MPD’s systems failed, forcing the department to direct its financial attention elsewhere.
Now that the department is back on its feet, Duke said body cameras are still an option of high interest.
To address implementation questions such as storage, cost and policy, an internal exploratory committee was formed in early April. Duke said the department has drafted a budget proposal, including a three-year transition phase where 34 of their officers would be issued body cameras. The proposal was presented to city administration April 9.
Duke said he hopes the department can present its proposal to the mayor mid-May and to city council by July. If the council approves it in July, it would then be heard in a public hearing in August.
“(The transition) shouldn’t be very difficult because we already have the infrastructure for video storage — we just have to buy a lot more,” Duke said.
Duke said he doubts the body camera proposal will be accepted this year.
“It’s something city leaders have to want us to proceed with, which means prioritizing it over street repair or water infrastructure,” Duke said. “If it’s something that’s pushed for, though, it’ll happen sooner rather than later.”
If the program proposal isn’t accepted this year, he said in time during the delay he believes vendors would address issues such as video quality, battery life storage space and wireless downloads, and the technology will only continue to evolve.
Regardless of what the city recommends this time, Duke said he is confident this is the first step in a longer process, and the department will move forward with a body camera program in the next couple years.
For community bystanders like Burnett, while the implementation of police body cameras in Moscow might pose logistical hurdles, it’s an important step for the city to take.
“It’s a significant challenge,” Burnett said. “There are financial and policy considerations involved, but I think the time has come for this technology to be put to constructive use again in order to some degree to remove the doubts and ambiguities of police encounters … They have the potential to become an important tool.”
Hannah Shirley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @itshannah7