Markeshia Ricks Photo
Starting Sept. 1 a small cadre of city cops will be outfitted with a new accessory: body cameras.
The department is launching a pilot program on that date to test out different body cameras, one of which could be rolled out to rank and file officers within the year.
In an update at Thursday’s weekly Compstat data-sharing meeting at 1 Union Ave., Lt. Racheal Cain reported that the police union and department brass came to an agreement on a temporary policy allowing for a 90-day pilot program. The policy was approved by the Board of Police Commissioners and signed by Police Chief Dean Esserman allowing for the cameras to be worn by officers who volunteer.
Union attorney Marshall Segar said Thursday that the union and the city both have a strong desire to get New Haven’s body camera program right, especially given the national focus on police conduct.
“A body camera program is not something we should be entering into lightly,” he said. “There are a lot of concerns at a wide variety of levels.”
Marshall said there is a prevailing sense among some that that body cameras will provide irrefutable evidence of police misconduct, but the union believes the cameras will show what police officers encounter in their work. He said the union feels the pilot program is a good place to test out the equipment, to see what kinds of problems arise and to gather information around issues such as data storage, Freedom of Information requests and officer overtime for downloading data.
“While body camera programs are not new to Connecticut, they are new to New Haven and because of the type of community oriented policing that we do, the union and the city want to get this right,” he said. “We have to get this right. The pilot program is a good start.” (Click here for a previous story outlining the union’s concerns about body cams.)
The police department has flyers up throughout the department, (like the one pictured at the top of the story), asking officers to volunteer. Cain said so far the response has been good; about a dozen officers have signed on to test out the cameras.
“Our goal is to have 27 officers in the pilot,” she said. Cain said that would allow three officers per shift to wear the cameras. The officers will be testing out three makes of cameras by two different manufacturers, Viveu and Taser. At least one of the cameras will be a small lapel camera. Each volunteer will have a chance to test each of the three cameras. They will spend one month with each camera.
“We’re going to be looking at three things: ease of use, quality of the footage and overall experience with the camera,” Cain said.
At the end of the experiment, the department will choose which camera to buy, according to Cain. Eventually all patrol officers are to be outfitted with the cameras.
The state of Connecticut and Obama administration are promoting the use of body cameras to address the nationwide tensions over relations between police and the policed. Branford and Hamden already outfit all their cops with body cameras, saying they protect good cops who do nothing wrong in contested incidents, as much as they protect citizens who also may be unfairly accused. (Read about that here. Click on the video and this story for an example of how a video exonerated an officer.) Meanwhile, some advocates of criminal-justice reforms have cautioned against unintended consequences of police body cams.
According to the general order governing the New Haven pilot program, all officers, including shift commanders, will receive training prior to officers being allowed to wear the cameras. Officers won’t have to have cameras operating at all times. They will be are directed to “activate the BWC (body-worn cameras) as soon as practical once it has been determined in the officer’s use of sound judgement that an incident is to be recorded.”
The policy outlines specific times when the camera will be turned off including “conversations with victims, crime witnesses or members of the community who refuse to speak on camera yet wish to report or discuss criminal activity in their neighborhood.” The camera also is not to be used to record communication with other police personnel, including undercover officers and confidential informants; when an officer is otherwise on break or in a bathroom or locker room; during a strip search; and in health care facilities.
Should the body camera be turned off after it has been activated, the officer will have to explain why it was deactivated. “If an exigent circumstance occurs in which an officer is involved in an incident and fails to activate their BWC, fails to record the entire contact or interrupts the recording, they shall complete the ‘Body Camera Activation Failure Report’ and submit to the System Administrators,” according to General Order 7.10.
In bold, the order reads: “Officers will not be disciplined during the pilot program for failure to activate the BWC.”