On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson (Mo.) Police Department. There is no debate as to whether Brown was armed. He was not. What has been debated is whether Brown fought with Wilson over his gun while Wilson was still in his cruiser, and if that gun went off inside the cruiser as they struggled for it. Additionally, Brown was shot and killed on the street after Wilson had exited his cruiser. Some eyewitness accounts have said that Brown was surrendering and had his hands up when shot. Other eyewitnesses have said that Brown had his hands only waist-high and was head down, charging at Wilson when Wilson fired.
One thing that is certain is if Wilson had been wearing a body-worn camera, many of the questions in this case could have been answered. The use of body-worn cameras in recent years has been shown to substantially reduce incidents of officer use of force, as well as lower the number of citizen complaints against officers.[i] Prosecutors have found that when defense attorneys are shown video evidence of their client’s criminal activity, the number of guilty pleas and plea bargaining agreements goes up. However, along with the many benefits of using these cameras come issues that can be problematic for the agencies that use them.
First and foremost are privacy concerns. Wiretap laws in some states prevent the audio recording of a police/citizen interaction without the consent of both parties. Videotaping a citizen in an area where that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy can also become problematic. Data storage is a huge issue. Even lower resolution video files consist of a tremendous amount of data, which is then multiplied by the number of officers using the cameras. Agencies must consider whether to store the video data in-house, through a second-party vendor, or in the Cloud.
Lastly, there are issues regarding the cameras themselves. Should the cameras be worn on the lapel, the epaulette or the front of the shirt? What type of camera should be purchased? Some cameras are voice activated and some are not. Some cameras have the capability to turn off audio while still recording video; others don’t have that capability. Lens field of view also varies; among the body-worn cameras commercially available today, the field of view varies from 63 to 180 degrees. Some cameras weigh less than two ounces and others weigh over a half-pound.[ii] Let's discuss all of these considerations.
Consider privacy expectations
Studies have shown that when officers use body-worn cameras, their use of force goes down dramatically. In studies conducted by the Rialto, Calif., and Mesa, Ariz. police departments, the drop in use of force by officers was 60 percent and 75 percent, respectively.[iii] It is believed that this is due to the deterring effect that the cameras have on both citizens and the officers wearing them.
An officer may be less likely to use force on a subject if he knows that the entire incident is being recorded. Likewise, citizens may be less likely to act in an aggressive manner if they know that encounters are being recorded. In addition, cameras have proven to significantly reduce the number of citizen complaints against officers. Part of this could be due to officers using less force; another factor is citizens may not make unfounded complaints when they know that encounters were videotaped. In the Rialto study, complaints dropped 88 percent.[iv] The Mesa study found that there were 40 percent fewer complaints against officers and 75 percent fewer use-of-force complaints. [v]
Privacy concerns are a major issue with the deployment of body-worn cameras. Citizens have no reasonable expectation of privacy when in a public place. The video recording of citizen contacts in public does not require the consent of the person being recorded. However, that changes when an officer wearing a camera enters a home to investigate a possible criminal offense. The citizen may request that the video be turned off. Since what is recorded may be accessible to the general public through Freedom of Information Act requests, some redaction of the video may be required to remove images of minors, crime victims, etc. According to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Community Oriented Policing Services office, some agencies have taken the stance that officers have a legal right to record inside a citizen’s house provided that they have legal justification to be in the house. If an officer is inside the house while on a call for service with the consent of the homeowner, or during the execution of a search warrant, officers may record.[vi]
Although the video recording of people in public is legal, the audio recording of citizen encounters varies by state. There are 12 states that require two-party consent to make an audio recording of a conversation between two people: California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington.* Pennsylvania recently added an exception for police officers using body-worn cameras. It is important for agencies in two-party consent states to purchase cameras that have the ability to turn off just the audio and continue to record video.
Two-party consent states can be problematic for officers on the street from an officer safety perspective. If an officer makes a subject stop of three suspicious men on a street corner, two-party consent states require that the officer advise all parties that they are being recorded. If two of the men agree to being recorded and one does not, another officer would then need to be called to the scene to watch the third man, while the first (and possibly second backup officer) deal with the two that did give consent. For agencies that have only a few officers on the street at a time, this can become quite a problem.
Can you handle the data?
Data retention policies must be made on a department-by-department basis. This should be based on current state laws and policies related to evidence and data retention. Each agency should consult with its respective prosecutor’s office for direction. Agencies should also consider which videos to store and how long to store them; this topic is too involved to discuss here. It is recommended that agencies perform research to help with that decision. A good starting point for policy and retention decisions is Police Officer Body-Worn Cameras: Assessing the Evidence, recently published by DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs and available at https://ojpdiagnosticcenter.org/sites/default/files/spotlight/download/Police%20Officer%20Body-Worn%20Cameras.pdf. Also helpful is Implementing a Body-Worn Camera Program: Recommendations and Lessons Learned, available at http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/472014912134715246869.pdf. Both reports cover these topics and others mentioned in this article in great depth.
Another decision facing agencies is where to store data. Body-worn cameras produce a tremendous amount of data, which could be stored using agency resources or via a Cloud-based solution. To put the amount of data these cameras produce into perspective, one officer having 10 citizen encounters per shift at 10 minutes per encounter will produce approximately 11 terabytes (TB) of data in the course of a year (1.2 gigabytes for each encounter at 640x480 pixels (p), which is standard definition, or SD). It is recommended that SD video recording be used as the 11TB example goes up to 33 TB of data per officer when video is recorded in high-definition (1080p). Multiply this by the number of officers per agency and it becomes apparent just how much data body-worn cameras produce. This is why agency policy on which videos to save and store is so important.
Capture a good "picture"
The technology that each camera uses varies greatly. As mentioned earlier, the field of view on commercially available body-worn cameras ranges from 63 to 180 degrees. Dr. Lars Ericson of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) Sensor, Surveillance, and Biometrics Technologies Center of Excellence (SSB CoE), has made some recommendations based on the Center’s two recent publications on body-worn cameras. Regarding field of view, Dr. Ericson recommends a 120- to 130-degree view. The 170- and 180-degree views often distort the image with a fisheye effect, which may not give an accurate representation of what the officer saw. (Overall, it is preferable to have a camera that records as closely as possible what the human eye sees.) Dr. Ericson also recommends that the lux rating, which is the measurement of the amount of light falling on an area weighted for the human eye sensitivity, should be less than or equal to 1lux, with the preferred rating being closer to 0.1 lux.[vii] (The SSB CoE reports A Primer on Body-Worn Cameras for Law Enforcement and Body-Worn Cameras for Criminal Justice: Market Survey are both available at www.justnet.org or by emailing [email protected].)
Some cameras offer a night mode, which may be infrared or low-light recording. A few have the ability to take still photos. All have the ability to date and time stamp each video, but not all have the ability to geo-tag the video using GPS. This may be an important feature to have if the citizen, in the process of filing a complaint, says that an event occurred at one location and the officer says it happened somewhere else. A geo-tagged video will confirm where the incident occurred. If the camera uses an external (rather than an internal) battery, a battery that runs low during an officer’s shift can be swapped out in the field without the officer’s having to go back to the station to either recharge the camera or swap it out for a charged one.[viii]
When researching body-worn cameras, an agency should discuss several key technical specifications with each vendor:
o Video resolution.
o File metadata (date/time stamp, officer ID or unit number, etc.).
o Low-light settings.
o Safeguarding of the video against editing, tampering, access, etc.
o Pre-event recording (usually 30 seconds).
o Battery life/performance.
o Operational cycle (officer picks up camera at start of shift, downloads at end of shift, places in charger, etc.)
o Video management[ix].
This article is by no means a thorough review of this camera technology. Readers are encouraged to read the various publications mentioned and referenced in this article, which go into much greater detail on the topics covered here.
Body-worn cameras may be the latest must-have technology for law enforcement, but as with any new technology, education, research and evaluation are the keys to the implementation. Policy considerations are just as important as technology selection.
The many benefits of body-worn cameras certainly outweigh any perceived shortfalls. These cameras provide irrefutable evidence for court and internal investigations, as well as assuaging the many concerns that civil rights groups have about agency transparency. And body-worn cameras are here to stay. It is imperative for agencies to keep up with this and other new and emerging technologies. Could a body-worn camera on Officer Darren Wilson have prevented the rioting in Ferguson? Possibly. What is probable is that Officer Wilson, had he been wearing a camera, could have either proved his innocence or verified his community’s concerns.
*This list has not been verified and is open to interpretation based on individual state laws. Some sources list Delaware and Nevada, others do not. The list is meant as a guide only to show the differences between states; agencies should check their respective state’s wiretap laws.
[i] White, Michael D. 2014. Police Officer Body-Worn Cameras: Assessing the Evidence. Washington, DC:
U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
[ii] ManTech Advanced Systems International, Inc. 2014. Body-Worn Cameras for Criminal Justice: Market
Survey. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.
[iii], v, vi Miller, Lindsay, Jessica Toliver, and Police Executive Research Forum. 2014. Implementing a Body-
Worn Camera Program: Recommendations and Lessons Learned. Washington, DC: Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services.
[iii], vii,viii, ix, x Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments Police Technology Subcommittee Meeting
(October 23, 2014; Washington, DC.)
