Two years after a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., set off a rush to put cameras on police, big questions remain about how the devices are used.
One challenge to finding answers: Many police departments don’t make it easy to understand the rules. A study of body camera policies in 50 police departments, released Tuesday, found that only 26 of them made their policies easily available to the public.
It was the second score card on body camera policies published by The Leadership Conference, an umbrella group of civil rights organizations, and Upturn, a group focused on technology and social issues.
The study looked at a range of criteria, giving each department an assessment on eight different factors related to its approach to accountability and privacy. No department fared worse than Ferguson, which failed each one. ‘‘It’s probably the worst body cam policy we’ve seen,’’ said Harlan Yu, a principal at Upturn.
The report made two main criticisms of body camera policies. Firstly, all departments allow police officers to review footage of contentious incidents before writing a report about what happened. This shouldn’t be allowed because it gives officers a chance to protect themselves from accountability by tailoring their stories to explain away misconduct, The Leadership Conference said.
Most police departments using body cameras disagree, as illustrated by how few put meaningful restrictions on officers viewing footage before submitting their statements.
The second concern is about surveillance. Civil rights advocates want departments to rule out building facial recognition systems that would enable automated analysis of large amounts of footage. While such an idea is far off, Taser — the leading provider of body cameras to police departments — has suggested such programs will become a reality. Of the departments the report examined, only Boston’s had a policy that ruled out a facial recognition program.
Ferguson’s policy was given a failing grade on all eight of The Leadership Conference’s criteria. The city’s policy isn’t made available to the public online, doesn’t have clear guidelines about when officers are required to record interactions with the public, doesn’t mention privacy, doesn’t prevent officers from watching videos before making a statement, doesn’t require footage to be deleted after a certain period of time, doesn’t prohibit tampering or misuse, doesn’t expressly make videos available to people filing complaints against the police, and is silent on facial recognition. The only other department to receive such a critical score was in Fresno, Calif.
Ferguson began using body cameras in September 2014, but the city hasn’t made its policy public.
Bloomberg News
