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Police departments around the country have been moving with unusual speed to equip officers with body cameras to film their often edgy encounters with the public. But the adoption of these cameras has created a new conflict over who has the right to view the recordings.
In Seattle, where a dozen officers started wearing body cameras in a pilot program in December, the department has set up its own YouTube channel, broadcasting a stream of blurred images to protect the privacy of people filmed. Much of this footage is uncontroversial; one scene shows a woman jogging past a group of people and an officer watching her, then having a muted conversation with people whose faces have been obscured.
“We were talking about the video and what to do with it, and someone said, ‘What do people do with police videos?’ ” said Mike Wagers, chief operating officer of the Seattle police. His answer: “They put it on YouTube.”
But YouTube video from other police body cameras can be violent and disturbing.
Scenes unfold slowly, in cinéma vérité style, as officers go about their work until a moment arrives when someone is suddenly shot and killed. Sometimes words are exchanged before the shootings, but often they occur in silence. The footage has little in common with the stylized deaths in Hollywood movies: There is often no sign of bleeding, and bodies lay twisted as if they have been broken.
In Bremerton, Wash., the police chief, Steven Strachan, is wary about making such footage public. After testing body cameras last year, he decided not to buy them for his 71 officers because he feared that the state’s public records laws would require him to turn over the film.
Requests for footage, he said, would create an unwieldy administrative burden for his small department and could potentially violate privacy.
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“We hit the pause button,” Chief Strachan said. “Our view is we don’t want to be part of violating people’s privacy for commercial or voyeuristic reasons. Everyone’s worst day is now going to be put on YouTube for eternity.”
Continue reading the main storySince the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager who was fatally shot during an encounter with a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August, departments around the country have begun requiring officers to record their interactions with the public to hold them accountable for their behavior, as well as to protect them against false charges.
Most big city police departments — including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia — are still testing body cameras, and it could be at least a year before a significant number of officers in those cities are wearing them. But the battle over who has the right to see the film is well underway.
At recent public forums, including in Los Angeles, advocates for the cameras have pressed the police to make the footage public. They pointed to police killings of unarmed black men and boys that did not lead to criminal charges, saying recordings could provide a fuller view of events than police accounts or even witness testimony.
Several of the killings have been captured by surveillance cameras or by bystanders with mobile phones. They include the death of Walter L. Scott, who was shot several times in the back by a police officer in North Charleston, S.C., this month.
“If the public doesn’t have the opportunity to view the video on their own, they are left with the police version of what happened, and as we’ve seen recently, their version isn’t always what happened,” said Laniece Williams, spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Coalition for Racial, Economic and Legal Justice.
“Even in cases where there isn’t a fatal shooting,” she continued, “there are instances where police brutalize people and the public should be able to see the video.”
Seattle Police Body Camera Footage
This edited body camera footage was posted on YouTube by the Seattle Police Department.
By Seattle Police Department on Publish Date April 27, 2015. .Some state legislatures, though, are coming out against broad disclosure policies. Among a flurry of 87 bills related to body cameras that have been introduced in 29 legislatures, 15 states are moving to limit what the public is allowed to see from the recordings. In some cases, lawmakers have sought to remove the videos from public records laws, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
“The issue challenges the assumption that everything that happens in public should be public,” said James McMahan, policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. “But I don’t know that we want a woman standing there with bruises and scratches and other signs of domestic violence to be posted on YouTube. The instance of her being posted online forever might be a greater crisis than the original incident.”
In Philadelphia, where officers have fired at suspects at a rate of nearly once each week during the past eight years and where the city has paid out millions of dollars to victims of police brutality, residents have strongly called for officers to be equipped with body cameras.
Activists like Ms. Williams say they fear that much of the video will never be seen publicly. They point to the department’s refusal to publicly release surveillance camera footage of the death of Brandon Tate-Brown, 26, who was shot by the police in December after being stopped for driving with his headlights off.
The Philadelphia police said that they had shown the video to Mr. Tate-Brown’s family, and that the department had not yet devised a policy on the release of video from body cameras.
In Florida, the Sarasota Police Department has temporarily halted its body camera program after an American Civil Liberties Union of Florida lawyer sued over the cost of obtaining footage. The city said it would charge $18,000 for 84 hours of video to be placed on DVDs — about $214 an hour of video.
Some of the most intense public discussion of the issue is taking place in Washington State, where state law allows anyone to file a public records request to obtain body camera recordings.
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In Bremerton, Chief Strachan tested body cameras last fall before deciding not to purchase them. He said the demands the department had received for video during the testing period had been too burdensome.
“We got a request for any and all video shot by a police officer,” he said. “It’s pretty much impossible.”
In nearby King County, Sheriff John Urquhart said he would not equip his deputies with cameras until lawmakers reworked disclosure rules.
“I’d do it in a heartbeat,” he said, “but if the public wants body cameras, they’re going to have to give something up on public disclosure.”
Legislation being considered in the State House of Representatives would generally limit access to the recordings to civilians directly involved in the encounter. Representative Drew Hansen, who introduced the bill, said there had been public records requests for “anything interesting,” including barroom fights.
But Mr. Wagers, the chief operating officer of the Seattle police, said he understood that the proliferation of body cameras had whetted the public’s appetite for access to the footage. The department, he said, is testing 12 body cameras but plans to outfit 900 patrol officers in 2016.
He said the ultimate goal was to post online every moment of officers’ body camera recordings.
“What’s the purpose of collecting the data?” he asked. “To move to accountability and get to the truth.”
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