B.C. police wait on province for next step toward body-worn cameras

Share

The first-person YouTube clip shows a Seattle police officer biking down a sidewalk and into an intersection where a mass of protesters is advancing toward a group of other officers. Muted, dark and heavily blurred, it's very difficult to make out individual faces in the footage, but within the half-hour video, the officer wearing the body camera appears to push several protesters.

The clip is one of 15 from February's turbulent Martin Luther King Jr. Day march, which the Seattle Police Department uploaded to its new online channel as part of a pilot body-cam program that it says it created "to help increase transparency and accountability while balancing the privacy rights of citizens."

People contemplating formal complaints can request chunks of footage when they allege misconduct from the SPD, which in most cases gives up the unredacted footage – meaning no added blur – at no charge under Washington's freedom-of-information laws.

While Seattle's department has grappled with many of the legal and practical problems of using the body-worn cameras (BWCs), British Columbia's law-enforcement agencies are waiting on the provincial government to produce a unified policy on how to best deploy the devices. Police chiefs and top RCMP officials in the province say it would be too costly for them to each complete the legal groundwork needed to implement a body-camera policy that complies with the relevant privacy laws and the onerous amount of disclosure of evidence they say is included in any charge laid by the Crown in British Columbia.

Mike Wagers, a top civilian official in the Seattle department, said the force is halfway through a six-month pilot program outfitting 12 officers with the cameras and anecdotal evidence so far indicates it is a success.

"What we're hearing from our officers is similar to what we've heard from other departments: Once they get the camera, they like it," Mr. Wagers said. "Early research is showing that it helps reduce the need to use force and it also has reduced the number of complaints against officers. Something's happening there with that interaction, that, when you tell someone that they're being recorded, the citizens themselves may change their behaviour as well as the officers."

Mr. Wagers said the SPD will put out a request for a proposal soon after the pilot program ends in order to equip all its 900 patrol officers with cameras by next year.

A handful of municipal forces and RCMP detachments in Canada have completed pilot programs, but only Calgary's police department is close to outfitting all of its patrol officers, which it says will happen within the next two months when 750 cameras come online.

Law-enforcement agencies across the United States are moving much faster to deploy body-worn cameras as one answer to the calls for greater transparency brought on by several high-profile deaths of unarmed black men.

Mr. Wagers was called to Washington two weeks ago for a roundtable on how to disburse $75-million (U.S.) in funding to purchase 50,000 cameras for police officers across the country, which was part of an executive order announced last December by President Barack Obama in the wake of the Ferguson, Mo., protests.

Michael Brown's family had pleaded for every patrol officer in the United States to wear such a camera after a grand jury declined to lay charges in November against the Missouri police officer who killed the unarmed teenager and sparked unrest last summer. A U.S. Department of Justice report published last year recommended that police be transparent about their use of body cameras by posting their policies on their websites and "publicly releasing video recordings of controversial incidents."

Micheal Vonn, policy director with the BC Civil Liberties Association, said she had real concerns that people's privacy would be violated by the SPD's YouTube footage, despite the heavy blur applied to the clips. Ms. Vonn called on the provincial government to sit down with police forces and advocacy organizations such as hers to create a single approach for officers in British Columbia to follow when using a body camera.

Victoria Police Chief Frank Elsner, whose department successfully piloted the cameras in 2009, agreed that "it doesn't make sense for all the individual police departments to do it themselves, because we're asking all the same questions, so it makes sense to have a unified provincial approach."

B.C. Justice Minister Suzanne Anton told reporters two weeks ago that there are no current plans to issue a provincewide policy guiding departments contemplating the technology.

A spokesman, who declined to be identified, said ministry staff are monitoring the camera use of Mounties who dealt with Kinder Morgan protesters on Burnaby Mountain and Vancouver officers who deployed them during the eviction of squatters in the downtown.

In addition, Clayton Pecknold, B.C.'s director of police services, said he has a team preparing to study the issue after police chiefs from around the province asked him last November to produce an internal report on body-cam use around North America.

"We're going to do the analyzing over the next coming year," Mr. Pecknold said last week on the phone from an economics of policing conference in Ottawa.

"It would be dangerous for me to give you a [completion] date because, quite frankly, we don't have a project plan developed yet."

Michelle Lawrence, a University of Victoria law professor, told a recent all-party committee of the B.C. legislature that nine coroners' inquests in the province have recommended that police use body cameras.

"The cost of equipping our officers with cameras pales in comparison to the injuries and the harms that we all suffer when evidence of police encounters is not available to us for forensic review," Dr. Lawrence told the committee.

The economics behind responding to one particular citizen's video requests prompted the Seattle police department to create the YouTube channel last fall. Tim Clemans, a 24-year-old computer programmer, began bombarding the department with daily public disclosure requests for roughly 400,000 hours of video shot from police cruiser dashboards and its new body-cam program. Under Washington State's FOI laws, police must disclose, without charge, all requested video unless it involves a minor or sexual-assault victim or when victims or witnesses request nondisclosure. Vetting the footage to protect vulnerable people's identities takes its technicians an average of five minutes of work for each minute of video, according to the force.

Faced with the prospect of hundreds of hours such work, the agency responded by inviting Mr. Clemans and others from the tech-savvy region to a hackathon aimed at grappling with the privacy concerns of getting contentious video out quickly to a distrustful public.

"Most of the stuff that has to get redacted isn't very interesting – what people are going to care the most is 'was somebody called a name at a traffic stop? Was somebody punched by an officer?' " Mr. Clemans said. "I hear the police complain all the time about [negative videos] being cherry-picked, but then at the same time, they're making it hard to get access in the first place," Mr. Clemans said. "At the end of the day, there's a much better way to get these videos out."

Mr. Clemans is now working with the SPD under a research contract and envisions a future where police video is watched by people like law students to crowdsource the enforcement of police accountability.

"There are people that don't like change, a lot of people don't like doing extra work and they view this as extra work even though in the long term it's going to completely eliminate a lot of this unnecessary work that they're currently doing and allow them to focus on stuff that computers can't do." Mr. Clemans said.