By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
The New York Police Department
once seemed poised to be an early adopter of body cameras. A federal judge
thought the technology could curb unwarranted stops and searches of black and Hispanic
men. So in 2013, after finding the department’s stop-and-frisk practices
unconstitutional, the judge ordered that a pilot program be established in at
least five precincts.
Three years later, not one of the
department’s approximately 35,800 officers is wearing a body camera, even as
the devices have become a staple for officers elsewhere.
The Police Department says it is
committed to outfitting officers with body cameras, and on Monday said that a
company had been chosen to supply up to 5,000 over the next five years. But a
contract has yet to be signed, and a rollout of the cameras would not begin for
months.
The halting pace of its effort is
striking for an agency that has pledged to make itself a model of
technology-driven policing and a leader in improving police-community
relations.
Since the unrest in Ferguson, Mo.
and the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Walter Scott in South
Carolina, many police departments have moved to deploy the body-worn cameras.
Police forces in Chicago; Houston; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Oakland, Calif.; and
Washington each have at least 500 officers wearing the devices.
The video can provide a useful,
if often incomplete, record of what occurred during arrests, violent encounters
or police shootings. Such footage, along with video captured on bystanders’
smartphones, and on the dashboard cameras in police vehicles in many
jurisdictions, is driving a debate — across the country and in the policing
profession itself — over whether some officers are too quick to open fire, and,
if so, why that might be the case.
The recent shooting of a black
man by the police in Charlotte, N.C.,portions of which were recorded by body
cameras, has brought renewed attention to the practices of police departments
when it comes to how, or even whether, they record their encounters with
civilians.
Envisioned as a tool to bolster
police accountability, body cameras have faced pockets of resistance, from both
police reform advocates and some law enforcement agencies and state
legislatures. Reform advocates have cautioned that cameras could provide the
police with new methods of surveillance that might erode personal privacy,
while some law enforcement agencies have balked at the cost of storing so much
data, and some states have added restrictions on public access to the footage.
In North Carolina, where the
Charlotte police initially declined to release footage of the recent shooting
of Keith Lamont Scott, a new law that went into effect this month limits
release of police camera footage to the general public.
The fatal shooting of Terence
Crutcher in Tulsa, Okla., was recorded by a police dashboard camera and a
camera in a police helicopter; footage from both was released to the public.
The officer who shot Mr. Crutcher has been charged with manslaughter.
The New York department conducted
a pilot program involving 54 officers that ended in March. J. Peter Donald, a
spokesman for the agency, said one of the lessons was that “we needed better
policy guidance and training for officers on body cameras.” The project,
however, did not even satisfy the federal court order calling for a robust
pilot program.
Even dashboard cameras, which
have become standard in many departments, are not used in the vast majority of
the New York Police Department’s patrol vehicles.
Police officials have attributed
the delays to the city’s procurement process and the department’s need to
carefully select the right equipment before proceeding on a larger scale.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, center,
with the New York City police commissioner, William J. Bratton, left, and the
city’s public advocate, Letitia James, announcing a pilot program putting
body-worn cameras on police officers in 2014. CreditOzier Muhammad/The New York
Times
At a news conference on Monday,
city officials announced that the company chosen to supply the 5,000 cameras is
Vievu L.L.C. of Seattle.
“There are still things that have
to be worked through,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “But I want to be very clear
that they are coming.”
The rules regarding what officers
record, and when, and who outside the department will have access to the
footage, have yet to be made final.
A member of the City Council’s
Public Safety Committee, Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat, said he believed the
“glacial pace” reflected a lack of enthusiasm. “What do you expect to happen
when the N.Y.P.D. sets the terms and the pace of police reform?” Councilman
Torres said in an interview. “I have trouble imagining it’s for lack of
capacity,” he said of the delays. “I suspect it’s for lack of will.”
The mayor said the department has
been acting prudently. “We’ve been very, very clear about the complication and
the challenges of doing this in the biggest city in the country with the
biggest police force, by far, in the country,” Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said
at the news conference. “So we’re going be purposeful about getting it right.
Once we start down the road, we have to make sure that we are getting it
right.”
The timetable puts the New York
agency behind a number of other big city departments.
The Chicago Police Department has
2,000 body cameras in use. The Los Angeles Police Department has so far
deployed 1,160. In Charlotte, most of the police force is outfitted with body
cameras.
In New Jersey, the State Police
have a pilot program involving more than a 100 cameras, though many troopers
also have a dashboard camera in their cars. The Newark Police Department, which
was placed under federal supervision earlier this year after a Justice
Department investigation, is not using body-worn cameras.
New York City and New York State
have been slower than many jurisdictions in putting in place not only the use
of body cameras but also some other criminal justice reforms.
And when it comes to transparency
regarding officer misconduct, New York City is becoming more secretive. The
city has filed a legal appeal to prevent the release of a summary of
disciplinary records involving Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island officer who
applied the fatal chokehold to Mr. Garner in 2014. This year it stopped providing
reporters with notification of suspensions and other significant disciplinary
actions against officers.
The use of body-worn cameras by
the police, regarded as a novelty just a few years ago, has quickly grown in
acceptance.
The ubiquity of cellphone videos
taken of police encounters with the public helped convince departments that
they, too, should be recording. So has an aggressive marketing push by
companies that produce the body-worn cameras, particularly Taser International,
whose Axon brand cameras have, according to Taser, been bought by 3,500 police
agencies nationwide.
While body-worn cameras were
quickly hailed as a tool to foster police accountability, some civil rights
activists and technology experts say they are more concerned with the policies
that police departments develop regarding use of the cameras than the speed
with which officers start wearing them.
“I think the view has been
shifting,” said Harlan Yu, who works for Upturn, a technology consultancy, and
who was involved in the compilation of a comprehensive review of police
departments’ policies. “Many of the groups I work with don’t see body cameras
as a silver bullet for the problems we’re seeing in our communities when it
comes to policing.”
The devices raise privacy
questions. Among them: Should police officers keep recording inside homes,
where the expectation of privacy is greatest, along with the potential for
unwarranted intrusions?
Mr. Yu noted that very few
departments had policies that clearly provided a right to view any body camera
footage of a police encounter to those that allege misconduct. The departments
in Las Vegas and Washington were exceptions; both had clear procedures in place
for individuals to review footage pertaining to the police, he said.
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