If not for the cell phone video that surfaced last week depicting Officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott as he fled, unarmed, in North Charleston, the only record of that event would have been the officer’s false testimony.
As a result, community leaders, activists, officers, and citizens are again discussing the potential of police body cameras as a useful tool to protect both citizens and the police.
At a police-community relations panel discussion at the Downtown United Presbyterian Church, Deputy Chief Wayne Harris updated citizens about the status of Rochester’s police body camera program announced last December.
Harris says they've been looking at police departments across the country, at the various devices they use as well as the guidelines in place to manage them.
"The Rochester Police Department determined that if we were going to put body cameras on our officers, the one thing we would do would be to have a strong policy that dictates when they're being used, how they're being used, and what they capture."
The policy in place would dictate the kind of technology the RPD adopted. Police body cameras vary in size, scope, and recording options. Some devices are attached to eyewear, while others are worn around the neck like a lanyard or clipped to a pocket or shirt collar.
A main point of contention between police departments, unions, and activists is the record function of the police body cameras. Harris, as well as other guests on the panel including Reverend James Stewart from the United Christian Leadership Ministry, referred to Gates' implementation of body cameras. Under their current system, the individual officer controls the record function of a camera clipped to their breast pocket.
The United Christian Leadership Ministry and the Rochester Coalition for Police Reform put forth their own proposal, urging city officials to take control of the record function out of the hands of the officers.
Harris offered up a possible compromise: Taser International's wearable devices. Their cameras offer a 30-second buffer between the time it starts capturing video and the time a record button is pressed.
Steve Tuttle is a spokesman for Taser International. He says their cameras are actually constantly recording, but they only save video when prompted.
"Let's say I'm driving around in New York and I see a person run a red light. The camera was already recording that event, but I need to tell the camera to save that event going forward. When I double click a round button on the device, it goes back to the previous, pre-event buffer of 30 seconds of video only, so it’s actually captured that person running a red light."
The cameras only begin recording audio once they are activated.
Tuttle says best practices indicate officers should start recording the moment they are called to respond or begin an interaction with a citizen. That leaves the officer in charge of their own record function, but establishes a protocol for using the cameras that would be enforceable.
Harris says Taser International is also an attractive option because it offers cloud solutions for storing the vast amounts of digital data collected as a result of a wearable camera program.
But they're not decided just yet. Harris says they are still weighing their options about what kind of camera makes sense for them.
"We have to determine exactly which camera is best to use. There's an awful lot that goes into just picking a system."
He says the digital data collected by the cameras will be accessible through FOIA requests.
The Rochester Police Department is scheduled to submit their recommendations to Mayor Lovely Warren by July 1, and Harris says they are on track to meet that deadline. After that, they will begin the process of implementing the devices.
"The City of Rochester and the Rochester Police Department will have body cameras."
Unique Fair was also a panelist with Harris. He's the Student Representative of the Rochester City School Board, and he says people already have the capability to hold officers accountable.
"In recent history, extremely recent history, we've seen that you've had people with their iPhones recording events of police officers and then using that as evidence to show that maybe these officers were acting out of hand, or maybe they weren't."
Fair says until the body camera program is fully functional, people have other ways of what he called “watching the watchmen.”
