MISSION TO EQUIP: Law enforcement agencies embrace body cameras
Almost two weeks after a violent encounter with an armed suspect was captured on body cameras, the Columbus Police Department plans to equip more officers with the devices in a three-month test program starting Monday.
Plans to expand the use of body cameras were already in place before the Nov. 3 investigation on 28th Street left three officers injured and the suspect -- 29-year-old Towon O. Earl -- with seven felony charges and a gunshot wound in his leg. Raw video of the shooting played a key role in both the investigation into the shooting and answering questions from the public.
Police Maj. Stan Swiney, head of the department's Bureau of Support Services, said the department has about 30 total body cameras in use in the Special Operations Unit and Motor Squad Unit but will boost that to about 25 more cameras on each of the three patrol shifts. In a police department with 488 sworn officers, approximately 105 officers are wearing body cameras.
"The plan in the future is to equip all officers," Swiney said.
Use of body-camera technology started with some local agencies and across the country after the August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Swiney said the body camera has been in Columbus since early last year, and it's one more tool that allows the public to see how the department works.
"I think people were shocked at the violence of the case up there and how fast these officers have to make decisions, what they have to do in a split second," Swiney said. "Everybody said, 'Wow!'
"This is not something we look forward to with negativity or concern."
Providing more officers with cameras gives police a chance to review its policy, find out how much video officers will generate and how to download and store what technicians call terabytes -- or 1,000 gigabytes -- of data. It now takes a traffic officer about five days to fill 32 gigabytes on a camera that costs $350.
Under the current policy, officers don't record every activity, such as when they aren't on official police business. They record traffic stops and accident investigations and official contact with people.
"We have to ensure that the officers are familiar with the law about privacy and all this other stuff," Swiney said. "We have to teach them when and how to use the cameras."
The law requires departments to store the video for five years. The body camera video is stored in addition to data from dash cameras on all the marked patrol cruisers. "The big challenge to us is going to be managing the video -- physically managing the video," Swiney said.
With limited resources, Swiney is concerned about staffing to download the body camera video. "Right now, I've got one fellow that does almost nothing but car videos," he said. "We are going to ask him to do the three squads of camera video on top of the car videos as we see how that works. I suspect before it is over with, I'm going to have to ask for a person to work downloading camera videos."
Muscogee County Marshal Greg Countryman said his office has 20 body cameras -- purchased in July at a total cost of $12,000 -- available for his staff of 17 sworn officers and two reserve deputies.
Countryman said his office hasn't experienced any problems since acquiring the tool in early July. Deputies use them in the courtroom and while serving civil papers, evictions and on traffic stops.
"I say that every person that gets into law enforcement that has a gun and badge and sworn to uphold a duty needs to have a body camera," the marshal said.
Using the 28th Street shooting as an example, Countryman said if officers had to state what happened, you would have one version from police and another version from the public. "With the body camera, which was the neutral eyewitness to everything, it showed it raw," he said. "What that does is we don't have to worry about people coming after the council, don't have to worry about people protesting over the police shooting somebody because they actually saw the police actions and the suspect's inactions and he did not obey orders."
Countryman noted that a recent Department of Justice study showed that only 30 percent of the more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have body cameras. He said the nation didn't learn a lesson from the 1991 Rodney King beating by officers in Los Angeles.
"Now in 2015, we are actually forced to go to body cams," Countryman said. "I think that if you are going to operate in the 21st century, you must have body cameras and you much have technology to allow you to have the public trust.
Phenix City cameras
Across the Chattahoochee River in Phenix City, Police Chief Ray Smith said all 60 uniformed officers were issued a body camera in December 2014 as part of department policy. The department is aiming to have all 95 of its sworn officers wearing body cameras by the end of 2016, Smith said.
"Because uniformed officers are the ones most likely to have a situation where it needs to be recorded, they are the ones that get it," Smith said. "Some investigators are currently wearing them, but not 100 percent of them are."
The department purchased the equipment from Digital Ally Inc. The body cameras, which cost about $700 per unit, are designed in such a way that the footage can't be manipulated before it's downloaded.
Officers are required to start the recording device anytime they start an interaction with a citizen. When it comes to making an arrest, Smith said the video camera must stay on during the entire incident.
"If possible, we try to notify the people that we're interacting with that the video camera is on and give them an opportunity to ask for it not to be recorded, if they would like, in order to protect their privacy," Smith said. "Not all the time that we're talking to somebody is it involving a criminal matter. It may be a victim, for example, giving us a report. We record everything, unless the victim asks us not to."
Smith said some officers chose to buy their own body cameras before the department put a policy in place, because they wanted to protect themselves from false accusations. As part of the policy, officials are now required to use the devices issued by the department.
"The particular model we have has a DVD that they can place either anywhere on their utility belt or their pocket," he said. "They place it in several locations and then they have a wire that runs up the shirt and has a little small lens that buttons to their shirt."
Over the months, the department has worked to improve their equipment. Even if someone were to snatch a body camera off of an officer, that person would only be detaching the camera head and the recording itself would be somewhere else on the officer, Smith said.
"The first body cameras we got recorded both audio and video, but they had a switch on the side that allowed you to turn off the audio," Smith said. "We said that was a bad design. We went back to the company and asked the company to just remove that switch entirely."
He said the department also made sure to get body cameras that show an accurate depiction of what the officer is seeing at that time.
"We wanted to make sure that the body camera didn't see better than the officer," Smith said. "In other words, if we don't have night vision, we don't want our body cameras to have night vision. We want it to be able to see exactly what we're seeing, so that everything caught by that video is indicative of what you'd expect to see with the human eye."
Smith noted that Phenix City Police Department still uses dash cameras to record their day-to-day interactions with the public, because body cameras aren't 100 percent reliable when it comes to capturing an incident.
"Even if you have (a body camera), there have been times where there have been damages because either (the officer) was involved in an altercation or there was some kind of mechanical failure with it," Smith said.
After their shifts, officers are required to put their body cameras into a docking station that downloads and categorizes the video before putting it into a secure server that's password-encrypted. Supervisors have access to the footage, and how they handle the recording is documented, Smith said.
"There is a trail or metadata that's attached to that video so you can verify that there was no way that the video can be manipulated or modified in any way. It only can be copied to a disk and that's it," Smith said.
Smith said supervisors select a handful of body camera videos at random each day and review them as part of the department's policy.
"That's basically an auditing feature to make sure that the officers are doing what they're supposed to be doing, making sure they're following policy," Smith said. "Certainly when someone comes in and files a complaint, then we go to video library, find that interaction and then review it at that point as well."
Alabama state law indicates that law enforcement must keep any evidence five years after an investigation has been launched, the chief said.
"Videos are very memory-intensive," Smith said. "We've got a 55-terabyte server that was not cheap, and that's still not enough to store every piece of video that we collect. And of course in doing business, we're going to have to continue to grow that server to maybe even 100 terabytes to be able to get the required five years."
Public scrutiny
Phenix City police made the decision to purchase body cameras in the wake of the controversial police-involved killings across the nation. He said that there wasn't one particular incident that sparked the department's decision, but he did mention the fatal officer-involved shooting in Ferguson, Mo., in addition to the death of Eric Garner, who died after a New York City police officer put him in chokehold. Like Wilson, the officer accused of Garner's death wasn't indicted in the case.
"We don't live in a bubble," Smith said of his department. "Certainly, the events all across the country impacted our reasons for the cameras and having them installed. We felt that they were important enough that we didn't want to wait until they were mandated."
Smith said that the public tends to forget that the police department tries to avoid violent interactions with people of the community but it's sometimes unavoidable. He said the growing nationwide conversation about excessive police force has put law enforcement under an incredible amount of scrutiny that body cameras can help alleviate.
"All the officers know that they're under an incredible amount of scrutiny, probably more than any other profession any time in the history of the world," he said. "Certainly we need to have that scrutiny, because we're tasked with taking people into custody and depriving them of their freedom. Certainly we want to make sure that it's done right; it's done with due process; and it's done with compassion at the very end of the day."
Protecting everyone
For more than a year, the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers, has conducted conversations about body cameras. FOP leaders and attorneys across the country met for a teleconference in which they discussed the pros and cons of body cameras in response to the shooting in Ferguson.
Georgia State FOP Vice President Randy Robertson said the outrage concerning then-Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson's decision to fatally shoot an unarmed black teenager could have been avoided if the official was wearing a body camera.
"If Darren Wilson would have had a body camera at the time of the incident, within a day or two everybody would have known that he was telling the truth," he said. "These individuals flocking to Missouri in order to cause an uprising and attempting to cause a race war and other problems would not have had an opportunity to give out an erroneous message."
In hopes of protecting law enforcement officers from false accusations and keeping officials honest, FOP lobbyists have been visiting state capitals across the nation educating legislatures on the need to supply law enforcement agencies with body cameras.
Robertson, who recently retired from the Muscogee County Sheriff's Office, said the FOP still has some things to consider when it comes to how often the cameras should be worn and when they should be turned on and off. One of the group's biggest concerns is the privacy rights for both the officers and victims. Georgia state legislature has already addressed issues with the body cameras used in private homes, he added.
"They had to make some changes to Georgia law because average citizens do not give up their right to privacy just because they call law enforcement to their house," Robertson said. "We as law enforcement officers want to abide by all the rules and regulations of our state and constitution, so there were some issues that the FOP had about that. We want body cameras, but there has to be a balance somewhere in there."
The use of body cameras has garnered support from Tonza S. Thomas, president of the Columbus branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She watched the video of the shooting on 28th Street and said Friday that the cameras worked well in that police incident.
"I don't think the general public knows that they are really on the streets of Columbus," she said. "I think they really found out when that occurred because they wanted the information so fast. The video actually worked in favor of the police department on that one."
Body cameras also were part of an awareness meeting with the NAACP and the Federal Bureau of Investigation during its July convention in Philadelphia.
"I personally and the NAACP are staunch supporters of the body camera," Thomas said. "The only issue we have about the body camera is the data can be stored in another place other than the police department."
This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 9:44 PM with the headline "MISSION TO EQUIP: Law enforcement agencies embrace body cameras."