By J. DAVID GOODMANSEPT. 4,
2014
The New York Police Department
will begin equipping a small number of its officers with wearable video
cameras, a pilot program geared toward eventually outfitting the nation’s
largest police force with technology that promises greater accountability.
A total of 60 cameras will be
deployed in the coming months in five high-crime police precincts, one in each
of the city’s five boroughs, Commissioner William J. Bratton said on Thursday.
“It is the next wave,” Mr.
Bratton said at Police Headquarters with two officers who wore the small
cameras on their uniforms. He likened the introduction of cameras to the
rollout, decades before, of hand-held police radios whose crackling codes and
blips are now a quintessential part of policing everywhere.
A federal judge last year
ordered the department to test the cameras for one year in five precincts as a
way of evaluating their effectiveness in curbing unconstitutional
stop-and-frisk interactions by officers. The court ordered an independent
monitor to help set the policy for the cameras, though that order has been
delayed pending an appeal.
Mr. Bratton said the department
was proceeding “independent of the order” because the subject is “too important
to wait.” The announcement also comes in advance of federal guidelines on body
cameras worn by the police, expected to be released by the Justice Department
in the coming weeks.
The cameras, which attach to
the uniforms officers wear on patrol, can offer visual evidence in
he-said-she-said encounters between the police and the public. Calls for all
officers to wear them have grown after the fatal shooting by a white officer of
an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last month.
Darius Charney, a lawyer for
the plaintiffs in the stop-and-frisk case, criticized the department’s plans to
move ahead on the cameras unilaterally.
“This kind of unilateral
decision on the part of the N.Y.P.D. is part of the same uncollaborative,
nontransparent, go-it-alone approach to police reform we saw with the prior
N.Y.P.D. and mayoral administration,” Mr. Charney, of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, said in an email.
The pilot program will hew
closely to the judge’s order in some respects, but not in others. The
precincts, selected in “direct response” to the order, Mr. Bratton said,
include ones in Harlem; the South Bronx; East New York, Brooklyn; Jamaica,
Queens; and northeastern Staten Island, where a man accused of selling loose
cigarettes, Eric Garner, died after a police chokehold last month.
Mr. Bratton said the cameras
would also be given to officers in a police service area covering housing
complexes in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
But the department is eschewing
the one-year timetable in favor of a less fixed time frame. The program is
expected to begin in the fall, but Mr. Bratton did not say how long it would
last.
Officers will participate
voluntarily, with a goal of having at least one officer wearing a camera on
each shift at the selected precincts.
Thousands of small- and
medium-size police departments have been using the cameras for the past few
years, and many big city police forces, including Los Angeles and Washington,
have begun tests or have plans to do so.
But the participation of the
New York department, with its 35,000 uniformed members and vast footprint on
the country’s policing policy, could permanently shift the balance in favor of
the cameras, which both civil libertarians and many police chiefs have cited as
a way to improve relations between citizens and law enforcement, particularly
in heavily policed minority communities.
In New York’s test, it is not a
question of whether the city’s officers will wear video cameras in the future,
but how best to have them do so, Mr. Bratton said.
The embrace of cameras, by Mr.
Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio, is a major departure from the previous
administration, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg calling them a “nightmare.”
Under Mr. Bratton, police
officials went to Los Angeles earlier this year to look at that department’s
pilot program for cameras, where the first participants were also volunteers.
The New York police will test
cameras made by two manufacturers: a one-piece device from Vievu and a
two-piece system from Taser International, in which the battery and activation
switches are separate from the camera itself. The companies’ cameras were
selected, Mr. Bratton said, because they provide “end-to-end” systems that
include storage both on-site and remotely.
The cost of beginning the
program is $60,000, Mr. Bratton said, paid for by the Police Foundation, a
nonprofit group that raises money for activities not covered in the
department’s budget. The cost of storing the video and administering the
program is expected to outstrip that amount quickly.
So far, departments around the
country have been largely on their own in drafting policies over basic
questions, like when the cameras should be turned on. Little research exists on
the effect of the cameras on community-police interactions, though studies have
suggested their use reduces both citizen complaints and officers’ use of force.
Many departments allow the cameras to be employed at the discretion of the
officer.
Mr. Bratton said the camera
policy had yet to be finalized. He added that depending on the circumstance,
officers could be required to record, prohibited from recording, or given the
discretion to choose. Officers would be permitted to view video they recorded
before making statements in cases where their conduct was questioned, he
said.Patrick J. Lynch, the head of the union representing the city’s patrol
officers, said in a statement that there were “many unanswered questions as to
how this will work practically.”
“We await the answers,” he
continued.
