Police chief urges B.C. government to get on board with body cameras for cops
Report urges B.C. government to take the lead in implementing policy
NDP justice critic Mike Farnworth offered an interpretation of her comments.
“When the minister says, ‘We’re monitoring,’ it means they’re doing nothing,” he said. “And they’re not going to do anything unless they’re pushed.”
British Columbia has seen many tragic examples of police-involved deaths, including the airport Tasering of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski.
But Farnworth argued body cameras for cops would not only protect the public against possible misconduct by police. “It would also work vice versa, and show how the public is behaving toward the police,” he said, arguing the cameras could protect cops against false or mistaken claims of misconduct.
Body cameras for police have worked well in other jurisdictions.
In Rialto, Calif., public complaints against police officers plunged 88 per cent and officers’ use of force fell 60 per cent after body cameras were introduced.
The cameras were also successful during a 2009 pilot project in Victoria, the police chief said.
“The public’s perception was that the officers acted more professionally,” Elsner said.
“The officers that wore them resulted in zero complaints against those officers.”
Anton said the government is not opposed to the cameras. She just doesn’t think it’s the government’s role to tell municipal police departments and RCMP detachments to use them.
“It’s up to the individual departments,” she said. “It’s a new technology. We’re keeping an eye on it.”
But the Victoria chief thinks the government should be taking the lead, not waiting for local police departments to act individually.
“We’re looking for leadership from the province,” said Elsner, saying there are crucial policy issues around the cameras like privacy rights, how video evidence should be preserved and presented to Crown attorneys, and who has access to the data.
“That’s the level where the government can show leadership and demonstrate a common approach to this,” he said.
“Each police department making its own policies, speaking to the privacy commissioner, speaking to the Crown attorneys — I think it’s fruitless.
“It’s a very intrusive technology and the public should feel very secure when the police are using it and that we’re all using it the same way.”
Farnworth agreed, saying the government should be leading the reforms, not “monitoring” them. “You cannot have a series of patchwork policies applied to different police forces across the province,” the NDP critic said.
“The government needs to take a leadership role and say, ‘We’re not going to leave it up to individual detachments. This is the standard of policing we expect right across the province and we’re going to take a leadership role.’ ”
But the government doesn’t seem anxious to take that role, including shouldering the additional cost of body-camera programs.
“Police departments are paid for by their local municipalities,” said Anton. “That would come out of a city’s budget.” None of which impresses Farnworth, who points out the legislative committee calling for “aggressive” leadership from the government was made up of Liberal and NDP MLAs.
“People often complain that there’s too much partisanship in politics,” he said.
“Yet here you have a committee that’s working well, they come up with a unanimous report from both sides of the house, saying it’s good public policy, it makes sense, so why not move on it? And then for the government to say, ‘Oh, we’re just monitoring it’ — that’s just inaction.
“The public deserves better.”