Dion Johnson’s death by police not on camera; DPS officers lack bodycams

A highway trooper approached a car stopped on the freeway in late May and found a man sleeping inside. It is not entirely clear what happened next. But within minutes, that driver would be shot by the trooper, making him the most recent person to die at the hands of police in Arizona.

The death is being investigated. But those probing it are missing information that would have been collected had the incident happened in nearly any other part of the city but the freeway: footage from a camera attached to the officer’s uniform.

The Department of Public Safety, the agency chiefly responsible for patrolling Arizona’s highways, is the largest law enforcement agency in the state not to equip any officers with body cameras.

Though the idea has been entertained for years, the agency never requested the funds. Money was on its way to the department this year. But the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus halted that effort.

Dion Johnson, 28, was asleep in his car on Loop 101 in the northern part of the Phoenix metro area on May 25. Had Johnson instead parked his car on the city streets of Phoenix or nearby Scottsdale, the officer who stopped him would have recorded the encounter on a body camera.

Those cities confirmed to The Arizona Republic this week all of their patrol officers wear body cameras.

Other large departments in the region — Mesa, Tempe and Chandler — also confirmed that 100% of their patrol officers wear cameras. Glendale Police, according to its website, has also assigned cameras to all its patrol officers. Same with the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office, the agency that patrols unincorporated portions of the region.

The DPS was poised to receive funding for the cameras. Gov. Doug Ducey called for the cameras in his State of the State address that opened the legislative session in January 2020. A bill to provide the $4.8 million for the cameras and staff to handle the footage had passed the state House

unanimously.

But before the state Senate could hear the bill, legislative activity was paused due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Democratic lawmakers have asked Ducey to call a special session to address criminal justice reform. Among the proposals on their wish list: mandating that the DPS and all agencies statewide equip officers with body cameras.

It is an idea that was proposed by Rep. Reginald Bolding of Phoenix in 2015. The bill introduced by the thenfreshman lawmaker was held in the Rules committee and never received a hearing.

The renewed push for body cameras comes after Arizona and the nation have seen protest marches spurred by the death of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis officer held his knee on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Though those images were captured by a bystander. Minneapolis officers on the scene were wearing cameras. A limited amount of that footage has been released.

In Arizona, body-camera footage has helped illuminate incidents of officers using deadly force.

Those include the shooting by a Mesa officer of Daniel Shaver, an unarmed Texas exterminator in the hallway of a hotel. Jurors deciding whether the officer committed murder watched bodycam footage of Shaver crawling on his hands and knees, sobbing, confused and begging not to be shot. The officer, Philip “Mitch” Brailsford was found not guilty.

In Winslow, in northeastern Arizona, police released body-camera video of the shooting of 27-year-old Loreal Tsingine on Easter Sunday in 2016. Footage showed Tsingine walking towards an officer with scissors in her hand before she was shot. Prosecutors who reviewed the footage said the officer had reason to fear for his life.

Commanders at the DPS have not been philosophically opposed to cameras in recent years.

Frank Milstead, who Ducey appointed to head the agency after he was elected governor, had when he was the police chief in Mesa adopted body cameras for his officers.

However, in a 2015 interview with The Republic, Milstead described the DPS as underfunded and severely behind technologically. He mentioned an updated radio system and recordsmanagement system, not cameras, as the top priorities.

Later in 2015, Milstead sat on a legislative committee studying whether to recommend laws regarding the use of body cameras. Milstead voted no on every recommended law, but not because he was against cameras. His comments during the committee's final meeting indicated he thought decisions on how cameras were implemented should be left to individual departments, not lawmakers.

Milstead, while commenting on one proposal, said that the goal of body cameras was to be “accurate in the reporting of a police situation for court and for public trust and scrutiny.”

Yet, for the next three years, the department did not press for the cameras.

In 2018, Milstead told The Republic that he saw value in troopers having the cameras. “But we’ve just never had the financial support,” he said.

However, a review of the agency’s budget requests showed the DPS had never put that to the test by asking for the funds. The agency also didn’t figure out how much it would cost to equip its troopers with body cameras.

A spokesman for the agency told The Republic at the time that the agency was reacting to informal feedback about how lawmakers might feel about certain projects and that body cameras had their detractors. The spokesman described the cameras as a nice perk, but not crucial to the department’s mission.

Rep. John Kavanagh of Scottsdale, who led that 2015 study committee, said he didn’t recall much resistance to cameras from lawmakers through the years. Though he said there might have been resistance to spending in general.

Kavanagh, a former detective at the Port Authority in New York, said he thought cameras were a good idea for officers, though he called the study committee to discuss issues such as privacy.

Kavanagh said when he walked the beat, some of his fellow officers carried tape recorders for audio documentation of encounters.

Kavanagh said that police body-cam footage usually “clears the cops."

The Republic questioned the DPS about body cameras in 2018, after a trooper was shot to death. Tyler Edenhofer was killed after a motorist, Issac King, got hold of another trooper's handgun during a struggle. King has been charged with first-degree murder. Goodyear police, the agency that investigated the incident, had body-camera footage from its own officers who showed up at the scene. But none from DPS.

In January, the DPS was involved in another shooting that was only partly captured by cameras. A DPS trooper killed a man he struggled with near the Loop 202 in Tempe. There was in-car dash cam footage of part of the incident. But not after Trooper Hugh Grant and Mohamed Ahmed Al-Hashemi struggled on the asphalt.

Ducey mentioned that incident during his State of the State address to lawmakers. “These are the good guys,” Ducey said, “and we should do everything in our power to protect them.”

Ducey’s office did not respond to questions about whether the January incident involving the trooper was the sole reason he had called for the cameras. Or if there was another reason.

The bill that would have provided funds for 1,267 cameras and a new staff of 20 full-time positions to manage the footage was introduced in the House at the beginning of February. It sailed through committees in short order and passed unanimously on Feb. 27.

It did not receive a hearing in the Senate before the session was paused in mid-March.

Milstead retired in March. The new head of DPS, Col. Heston Silbert, was on Milstead’s command staff in Mesa as that department first introduced body cameras.

Silbert was not available to comment on the body camera issue at DPS.

Bolding, who met with Silbert this week, told The Republic before that meeting that he was hopeful DPS, and all agencies statewide, would get cameras.

“That has been something that’s been agreed upon by law enforcement, by mayors, by legislators,” Bolding said. “And if there is agreement, then we have to actually act.”

Some troopers apparently agree. An analyst for the governor’s budget office told Cronkite News in January that 20 state troopers already wear the cameras, having purchased them with their own money.