#policeperspective

[lowerthegun-blog]

People who've gained this type of experience know the real possibility of a cop losing his temper, how hard we have to guard against it, and how much it would erode the trust we strive for between police and the people they serve.

Brandon del Pozo

[myresearcharchive]

[myresearcharchive]

"The use of in-car cameras does not hinder the officer from performing his or her duties. When asked if the camera affects how the officers deal with situations, 70% maintained that they affect them very little or not at all. In terms of the cameras’ effects on officers’ discretion in handling situations, 86% reported that cameras had no effect. An overwhelming majority of the responding officers (89%) said that the cameras had no effect on their decision to use force in a situation. The line officers’ survey reveals that only 11% of officers reported that camera usage was moderately stressful or very stressful and 30% believed that the use of the camera was slightly stressful. Officers who perceived that an internal affairs investigation was the primary reason for instituting in-car cameras were also more likely to report that camera usage was “Moderately Stressful” or “Very Stressful.” The majority of officers (59%) did not believe the presence of the camera increased stress levels. Only 8% of officers indicated that they were less satisfied with their jobs, and 5% said they made fewer traffic stops. On the other hand, in-car cameras have resulted in 15% of the responding officers to be more satisfied with their jobs, and 7% reported making more traffic stops."

[myresearcharchive]

[myresearcharchive]

The official publication of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Please cite as:

Joe Fiumara, "The Future Is Near: Getting Ahead of the Challenges of Body-Worn Video," Technology Talk, The Police Chief 79 (September 2012): 54.

Technology Talk

The Future Is Near: Getting Ahead of the Challenges of Body-Worn Video

By Joe Fiumara, Operations Captain, Lake Havasu City, Arizona, Police Department

t’s coming and maybe faster than you think. There is nothing you can do to stop it. Depending on your point of view, on-officer or body-worn video (BWV) that integrates into daily operations and the courts may be a great or a not-so-great next big step for law enforcement.

Video recordings of law enforcement actions have been a peripheral but key influence for nearly a half century in one form or another. Video images of police tactics during civil rights protests in the 1960s certainly had profound social and legal impacts. George Holliday’s 1991 video capturing the Rodney King beating started a chain of events that reverberate even today. Cops, which first aired in 1989, is one of the longest running television shows in America, featuring officers in more than 140 different cities in the United States and in Hong Kong, London, and the former Soviet Union. The newest phenomenon in this regard is the proliferation of video-capable cellphones and the jumpy, mostly low-resolution images being captured by those who possess them. These video images are often uploaded to the web within minutes of capturing the events they depict. Most officers on the street today have been at incidents where more than one cellphone is recording their every movement and word. These are all examples of video cameras pointed toward police activity by the press, by ordinary citizens, and by reality television producers.

But what about when the police point the video cameras on their own activities, from their own perspectives? Aside from crime-scene documentation and video intended to record undercover operations, drug buys, and various types of protests, police self-recording has been limited primarily to in-car applications. In-car video systems spread through various U.S. state police and highway patrols in the early 2000s, supported in part by the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services In-Car Camera Incentive Program. A 2005 IACP study on in-car video and the impact of video evidence on modern policing identifies some positive results of this technology. Researchers documented that in-car cameras provide a substantial value to agencies using them, including

enhancing officer safety,

improving agency accountability,

reducing agency liability,

simplifying incident review,

enhancing new recruit and in-service training through post-incident use of videos,

improving community and media perceptions,

strengthening police leadership,

advancing prosecution and case resolution,

enhancing officer performance and professionalism,

increasing homeland security, and

upgrading technology policies and procedures1

In-car video systems have obviously had a measurable positive impact for law enforcement but in some respects offer limited value to county and municipal officers whose work often takes place away from the patrol car. The seemingly obvious solution to this problem is to put the video on the officer, but it was not until relatively recently that technology advanced with viable devices. A number of wearable video camera systems have hit the market in varying configurations in the past few years. Most are small, self-contained units that clip to the front of an officer’s uniform shirt (VieVu), act as radio speaker-mic substitutes (VidMic), or slip in the shirt pocket disguised as a pen (Spyer). Headworn video systems “look” where the officer looks. Two systems—the Taser International Axon Flex and the Tactical Electronics BWV4—consist of multimount cameras and separate controllers and recorders.

A unique aspect of the Taser system is the company’s development of an upload process to redundant, encrypted, off-site data centers via a high-speed Internet connection in a cloud-based service called Evidence.Com. Once video evidence is uploaded to Evidence.Com, it can be accessed—but not altered—by officers, supervisors, administrators, and prosecutors via a secure Internet log-in.

Now that we have briefly reviewed BWV technology, it is important to consider some of the accompanying challenges. BWV creates an opportunity to document all of an officer’s investigative or enforcement activities, not just what occurs in front of the patrol car. It also provides an opportunity to affect the way criminal cases proceed through the justice system and the promise of more efficient policing through a reduction in time spent writing reports. With those capabilities come new issues related to privacy, officer acceptance, public records law, and legal admissibility, just to name a few.

Some agencies already have seen an increase in officers’ use of self-purchased video devices. This practice brings concerns similar to officers’ use of self-purchased audio recording devices. Preservation, chain of custody, retention, and format problems can and will arise without definitive policies and safeguards in place. Similar concerns were identified in both the IACP in-car camera study and a BWV study conducted in the United Kingdom, the latter of which cited among its recommended standard operating procedures, “All recordings have the potential to be used in evidence, even if it appears to the user at the time of the incident that this is unlikely (e.g., a stop and search with a negative result). Therefore it is important that all recordings are treated as evidential in the first instance—until it is confirmed otherwise.”2 The California Highway Patrol paid a $2.37 million settlement to the family of an accident fatality victim after digital images from a fatal accident scene made their way to the Internet.3

A group of criminal justice practitioners met in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, to discuss this technology, its opportunities, and its challenges. Police executives, prosecutors, and public and private defense attorneys worked together to examine what obstacles are anticipated and what might be needed to overcome them. The following represents a snapshot of some of the challenges identified:

Redaction and Exclusion

Confidential informant development

On-scene officer sidebar discussions

On-scene tactical planning and decision making

Victim and in-home privacy concerns

Prosecutorial

Additional time required reviewing cases and preparing for court

Disclosure rules

Additional opportunities for impeachment

Nonactivation or missing segments

Officer Acceptance and Compliance

Accidental or intentional nonactivation

Accidental or intentional deactivation

Technology

Related, but nonsequential or nonconsecutive event identification and merging

Equipment failure

Data Storage

Optional offsite evidentiary data storage exists. According to the IACP in-car camera study, “After conducting site assessments throughout multiple jurisdictions, one common problem emerged. The issue of storage and management of audio/video recordings has become one of the largest obstacles agencies have had to overcome. The purchase, acquisition, duplication, and storage of recorded media requires personnel time commitment, space, and resources that the majority of agencies are not prepared to deal with. Maintaining and guarding the integrity of the recorded media was an overarching theme in our assessment.”4

Funding

A hurdle not yet broached in detail, perhaps for obvious reasons given the current economic climate.

For those, such as the author, who believe that the vast majority of law enforcement officers are dedicated and capable professionals who serve their communities in honorable fashion, BWV holds the promise of better documenting and validating officers’ good work. Concerns expressed about unreasonably increasing tort liability or harm to public relations simply do not hold water. Conversely, the author expects that BWV will result in protection of truth and a reduction in actual or claimed acts of unreasonable force and racial profiling. Officers likely will be able to function more efficiently and effectively and criminal cases likely will proceed through the court system with increased efficiency and—of upmost importance—with more accurate information and the fairest outcomes.

It is imperative that law enforcement takes proactive steps to guide policy development, standards, legal processes, and best practices in a manner that will foresee and overcome the anticipated challenges. Failure to do so could easily result in bad case law, unnecessary legal constraints, or a combination of the two that could hamper the many exciting opportunities presented by BWV. ♦

Notes: 1The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), The Impact of Video Evidence on Modern Policing (Alexandria, Va.: IACP, 2004), 2, 36,http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/video_evidence.pdf (accessed July 23, 2012). 2Police and Crime Standards Directorate, Guidance for the Police Use of Body-Worn Video Devices (London, England: Home Office, July 2007), 18–19, http://www.revealmedia.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=dH4IOGWh9ZI%3D&tabid=156 (accessed July 25, 2012). 3Rick Rojas, “CHP Settles over Leaked Photos of Woman Killed in Crash,” Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/31/local/la-me-chp-photos-20120131 (accessed July 23, 2012). 4IACP and COPS, The Impact of Video Evidence on Modern Policing.

[myresearcharchive]

Officer attitudes toward police use of force

Lester and Arcuri (cited in Lester 1995, And Justice For All) measured police officers’ attitudes toward police use of force in the context of the Rodney King aftermath. About two-thirds of officers reporters having witnessed police officers beating a suspect. One-third responded they would report an officer if they saw him beating a suspect.

[myresearcharchive]

Police use the "techno-fix" discourse to justify surveillance

Kearon 2012:

"...technology and technological expertise are mobilized as sources of legitimation for criminal justice practices to augment the increasingly fragmented, critical and theoretical forms of knowledge and expertise traditionally provided by academic criminology." (p. 3)

[myresearcharchive]

Contrasting officer and civilian accounts of use of force incidents

"the accounts provided by all the officers in our study included justifications for their actions and use of force" (p. 311)

According to officers who used force, they claimed that "When a suspect shows utter disregard for the officer’s orders, the encounter is likely to escalate" (p. 311).

Multiple officer accounts reiterate the story that they "only used force when multiple verbal instructions were ineffective. This account clearly attempts to connect the officer’s maintenance of authority by means of a legal and reasonable response to the suspect’s aggressive combative behavior" (p. 312)

Civilians account for the same events differently. "... a unanimous theme of injustice was observed across the citizens’ accounts. Citizen vocabularies of injustice extended along a continuum of culpability and included complete denial of culpability, an acceptance of partial fault, and the accusation of improper police procedures (i.e., procedural injustice)." (p. 313)

Civilians describe the police as overzealous in detaining and often not having justification for the stop to begin with. Yet even when the stop and searches were believed illegitimate, the main concern was with the excessive use of violent force (p. 315).

Nonetheless, many civilians felt "that the officers were responsible for creating the situation in which force was unavoidable" (p. 316) and then continued using violence long after the civilian was under control and restrained (p. 317)

Rojek, Jeff; Alpert, Geoffrey P.; Smith, Hayden P. (2012) "Examining Officer and Citizen Accounts of Police Use-of-Force Incidents." Crime & Delinquency 58(2) 301- 327