Body-worn cameras are not a good investment
Hamilton would be better served by investment in community services
When public money is used for surveillance in the name of community well-being and safety, the community loses out on opportunities to invest in early social and preventive measures for residents.
Last month the Ontario government announced that the private company Axon Public Safety Canada would be developing a provincial digital evidence management program to improve efficiencies and standardize the way evidence is managed by all policing and justice sector stakeholders. Solicitor General Sylvia Jones has so far refused to release the cost.
Axon Public Safety Canada is a privately owned company that makes Tasers and body cameras responsible for digitizing Ontario’s criminal justice system. This same company provides 1,200 Peel Regional Police officers with bodyworn cameras at a price tag of $9 million through a five-year contract. In Hamilton, the police board has not committed to using bodyworn cameras but expects periodic reports on how much it will cost taxpayers. Seeing that Hamilton is open to the idea of body-worn cameras, Axon wasted no time in lobbying the mayor and councillors on the police board, according to Joey Coleman of The Public Record.
While the city finalizes its operating budget for 2021, Hamilton Police Service is requesting a 2.98 per cent increase bringing its budget to $176 million. Suppose the mayor and fellow police board members councillors Tom Jackson and Chad Collins feel the need to adopt bodyworn cameras in the future. The exponential growth of the police budget is all but guaranteed.
We know that body-worn cameras do not prevent deadly use of force and systemic racism. Why are municipal, provincial, and federal governments spending enormous amounts of money purchasing body-worn cameras and developing digital evidence management programs that raise privacy concerns for residents? On the federal level, the RCMP is expected to buy 12,500 cameras for $131 million over five years. When the RCMP chief can’t explain systemic racism, how will purchasing 12,500 cameras address systemic racism and deadly use of force?
Hamilton residents are concerned about the opioid crisis, homelessness, hate crimes, mental health issues and more. The question remains how come there is money to buy cameras and approve increases to police budgets? Still, there is never any money to address social issues that affect community well-being and residents’ safety.
According to Public Health Hamilton, in 2019, Hamilton’s opioid related death was 75 per cent higher than the provincial rate. As of August 2020, opioid-related deaths in Hamilton were 83. In 2017, Mayor Fred Eisenberger convened an Opioid Response Summit highlighting a four-pillar approach of prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and enforcement to address the opioid crisis. To do this work, Hamilton requested $2.7 million over two years from upper levels of government. Yet council is considering a $5-million increase to the Hamilton Police budget.
With a COVID-19 weekly rate of new cases per 100,000 population at 58, total COVID-19 cases closing in on 10,000, and almost 300 deaths, does public health have enough resources to do contact tracing? Does public health have enough resources to serve the populations disproportionally affected by the COVID virus?
Body-worn cameras would not have prevented the death of Chevranna Abdi in the custody of Hamilton Police officers. More recently, in Barrie, a police officer assaulted a resident, Skyler Kent, including hitting him in the head with a Taser.
Skyler Kent was admitted to a local hospital after suffering head trauma. No body-worn camera would have prevented this assault.
Police departments across Canada hail Robert Peel’s principles “the ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police actions.” What they forget to tell the public is that Robert Peel’s ideas of policing were developed during the British colonial occupation of Ireland to quell riots and political uprisings — later adopted by the London Metropolitan Police with the main functions of protecting property, quelling riots, putting down strikes and other industrial actions and producing a disciplined industrial workforce according to Alex S. Vitale.
Nowhere does it say the purpose of policing is to address homelessness, the opioid crisis, systemic racism, myriad mental health crises, gender-based violence, and other social issues. At this point, it has become clear that policing is draining public money that could be better spent on addressing a myriad of socio-economic and health problems. When community safety and well-being are privatized as Taser production and body-worn cameras, residents will continue to lose their lives at the hands of the police; people will die because they are homeless, people will not get harmreduction supports, gender-violence will go unchecked.
Let’s invest in early social and preventive measures for residents, not body-worn cameras.